The Heart

Mistress Catherine and I returned together to Drake Hill, she

bearing herself with a sharp and anxious conciliation, and I with

little to say in response, and walking behind her, though she moved

more and more slowly that I might gain her side.

We were not yet in sight of Drake Hill, but the morning smoke from

the slave cabins had begun to thrust itself athwart the honeyed

sweetness of blossoms, and the salt freshness of the breath of the

tidal river, as the homely ways of life will ever do athwart the

beauty and inspiration of it, maybe to the making of its true

harmony, when of a sudden we both stopped and listened. Mistress

Catherine turned palely to me, and I dare say the thought of Indians

was in her mind, though they had long been quiet, then her face

relaxed and she smiled.

"'Tis the first day of May," said she. "And they are going to set up

the May-pole in Jarvis Field."

This did they every May of late, because some of the governors and

some of the people had kept to those prejudices against the May

revelries which had existed before the Restoration, and frowned upon

the May-pole set up in the Jamestown green as if it had been, as the

Roundheads used to claim, the veritable heathen god Baal.

Jarvis Field was a green tract, clear of trees, not far from us, and

presently we met the merry company proceeding thither. First came a

great rollicking posse of lads and lasses linked hand in hand, all

crowned with flowers, and bearing green and blossomy boughs over

shoulder. And these were so swift with the wild spirit and jollity

of the day that they must needs come in advance, even before the

horses which dragged the May-pole. Six of them there were, so

bedecked with ribbons and green garlands that I marvelled they could

see the road and were not wild with fear. But they seemed to enter

into the spirit of it all, and stepped highly and daintily with

proud archings of necks and tossings of green plumed heads, and

behind them the May-pole rasped and bumped and grated, the trunk of

a mighty oak yet bristling with green, like the stubble of a shaggy

beard of virility. And after the May-pole came surely the queerest

company of morris dancers that ever the world saw, except those of

which I have heard tell which danced in Herefordshire in the reign

of King James, those being composed of ten men whose ages made up

the sum of twelve hundred years. These, while not so ancient as

that, were still of the oldest men to be come at who could move

without crutches and whose estate was not of too much dignity for

such sports. And Maid Marion was the oldest and smallest of them

all, riding her hobby-horse, dressed in a yellow petticoat and a

crimson stomacher, with a great wig of yellow flax hanging down

under her gilt crown, and a painted mask to hide her white beard.

And after Maid Marion came dancing, with stiff struts and

gambols, old men as gayly attired as might be, with garlands of

peach-blossoms on their gray heads, bearing gad-sticks of peeled

willow-boughs wound with cowslips, and ringing bells and blowing

horns with all their might. And after them trooped young men and

maids, all flinging their heels aloft and waving with green and

flowers, and shouting and singing till it seemed the whole colony

was up and mad.