say happy, though his lot would have been
intolerable to me: wife, and friends, and plantation, and town life at
Richmond (Richmond succeeded to the honour of being the capital when our
Province became a State). How happy he whose foot fits the shoe which
fortune gives him! My income was five times as great, my house in
England as large, and built of bricks and faced with freestone; my
wife--would I have changed her for any other wife in the world? My
children--well, I am contented with my Lady Warrington's opinion about
them. But with all these plums and peaches and rich fruits out of
Plenty's horn poured into my lap, I fear I have been but an ingrate;
and Hodge, my gatekeeper, who shares his bread and scrap of bacon with
a family as large as his master's, seems to me to enjoy his meal as much
as I do, though Mrs. Molly prepares her best dishes and sweetmeats, and
Mr. Gumbo uncorks the choicest bottle from the cellar. Ah me! sweetmeats
have lost their savour for me, however they may rejoice my young ones
from the nursery, and the perfume of claret palls upon old noses!
Our parson has poured out his sermons many and many a time to me, and
perhaps I did not care for them much when he first broached them. Dost
thou remember, honest friend? (sure he does, for he has repeated the
story over the bottle as many times as his sermons almost, and my Lady
Warrington pretends as if she had never heard it)--I say, Joe Blake,
thou rememberest full well, and with advantages, that October evening
when we scrambled up an embrasure at Fort Clinton and a clubbed musket
would have dashed these valuable brains out, had not Joe's sword whipped
my rebellious countryman through the gizzard. Joe wore a red coat in
those days (the uniform of the brave Sixty-third, whose leader, the bold
Sill, fell pierced with many wounds beside him). He exchanged his red
for black and my pulpit. His doctrines are sound, and his sermons short.
We read the papers together over our wine. Not two months ago we read
our old friend Howe's glorious deed of the first of June. We were told
how the noble Rawdon, who fought with us at Fort Clinton, had joined the
Duke of York: and to-day his Royal Highness is in full retreat before
Pichegru: and he and my son Miles have taken Valenciennes for nothing!
Ah, parson! would you not like to put on your old Sixty-third coat?
(though I doubt Mrs. Blake could never make the buttons and button-holes
meet again over your big body).