I have always observed with wonder and amusement and a tender

gladness the faculty with which young creatures, and particularly

young girls, can throw off their minds for the time being the weight

of cares and anxieties and bring all of themselves to bear upon

those exercises of body or mind, to no particular end of serious

gain, which we call play and frivolity. It may be that faculty is so

ordained by a wise Providence, which so keeps youth and the bloom of

it upon the earth, and makes the spring and new enterprises

possible. It may be that without it we should rust and stick fast in

our ancient rivets and bolts of use.

That very next morning, after I had learned from Mary Cavendish,

supplemented by a sulky silence of assent from Sir Humphrey Hyde,

that she had, under presence of ordering feminine finery from

England, spent all her year's income from her crops on powder and

shot for the purpose of making a stand in the contemplated

destruction of the new tobacco crops, and thereby plunged herself

and her family in a danger which were hard to estimate were it

discovered, I heard a shrill duet of girlish laughs and merry

tongues before the house. Then, on looking forth, whom should I see

but Mary Cavendish and Cicely Hyde, her great gossip, and a young

coloured wench, all washing their faces in the May dew, which lay in

a great flood as of diamonds and pearls over everything. I minded

well the superstition, older than I, that, if a maid washed her face

in the first May dew, it would make her skin wondrous fair, and I

laughed to myself as I peeped around the shutter to think that Mary

Cavendish should think that she stood in need of such amendment of

nature. Down she knelt, dragging the hem of her chintz gown, which

was as gay with a maze of printed posies as any garden bed, and she

thrust her hollowed hands into the dew-laden green and brought them

over her face and rubbed till sure there was never anything like it

for sweet, glowing rosiness. And Cicely Hyde, who must have come

full early to Drake Hill for that purpose, did likewise, and with

more need, as I thought, for she was a brown maid, not so fair of

feature as some, though she had a merry heart, which gave to her

such a zest of life and welcome of friends as made her a favourite.

Up she scooped the dew and bathed her face, turning ever and anon to

Mary Cavendish with anxious inquiries, ending in trills of laughter

which would not be gainsaid in May-time and youth-time by aught of

so little moment as a brown skin. "How look I now?" she would cry

out. "How look I now, sweetheart? Saw you ever a lily as fair as my

face?" Then Mary, with her own face dripping with dew, with that

wonderful wet freshness of bloom upon it, would eye her with

seriousness as to any improvement, and bid her turn this way and

that. Then she would give it as her opinion that she had best

persevere, and laugh somewhat doubtfully at first, then in a full

peal when Cicely, nothing daunted by such discouragement in her

friend's eyes, went bravely to work again, all her slender body

shaking with mirth. But the most curious sight of all, and that

which occasioned the two maids the most merriment, though of a

covert and even tender and pitying sort, was Mary's black

serving-wench Sukey, a half-grown girl, who had been bidden to

attend her mistress upon this morning frolic. She was seated at a

distance, square in the wet greenness, and was plunging both hands

into the May dew and scrubbing her face with a fierce zeal, as if

her heart was in that pretty folly, as no doubt it was. And ever and

anon as she rubbed her cheeks, which shone the blacker and glossier

for it, she would turn the palms of her hands, which be so curiously

pale on a negro's hands, to see if perchance some of the darkness

had stirred. And when she saw not, then would she fall to scrubbing

again.




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