, with no means
of communication except what was afforded by rivers and wood roads;
having no trades, no industries, no means of spreading knowledge, only
one occupation, clumsily performed; and living a quiet, monotonous
existence, which can now hardly be realized. It is "a far cry to
Loch-Awe," as the Scotch proverb has it; and this old Virginian
society, although we should find it sorry work living in it, is both
pleasant and picturesque in the pages of history.

The population of Virginia, advancing toward half a million, and
divided pretty equally between the free whites and the enslaved
blacks, was densest, to use a most inappropriate word, at the water's
edge and near the mouths of the rivers. Thence it crept backwards,
following always the lines of the watercourses, and growing ever
thinner and more scattered until it reached the Blue Ridge. Behind
the mountains was the wilderness, haunted, as old John Lederer said a
century earlier, by monsters, and inhabited, as the eighteenth-century
Virginians very well knew, by savages and wild beasts, much more real
and dangerous than the hobgoblins of their ancestors.

The population, in proportion to its numbers, was very widely
distributed. It was not collected in groups, after the fashion with
which we are now familiar, for then there were no cities or towns
in Virginia. The only place which could pretend to either name was
Norfolk, the solitary seaport, which, with its six or seven thousand
inhabitants, formed the most glaring exception that any rule
solicitous of proof could possibly desire. Williamsburg, the capital,
was a straggling village, somewhat overweighted with the public
buildings and those of the college. It would light up into life and
vivacity during the season of politics and society, and then relapse
again into the country stillness. Outside of Williamsburg and Norfolk
there were various points which passed in the catalogue and on the map
for towns, but which in reality were merely the shadows of a name. The
most populous consisted of a few houses inhabited by storekeepers and
traders, some tobacco warehouses, and a tavern, clustered about the
church or court-house. Many others had only the church, or, if a
county seat, the church and court-house, keeping solitary state in the
woods. There once a week the sound of prayer and gossip, or at longer
intervals the voices of lawyers and politicians, and the shouts of the
wrestlers on the green, broke throu