ough baskets woven of river reeds?

Less matter for wonderment was that long-armed creature on the point of
land to Hans Houten and Heinrich Elkens, sailing up the James in the
White Dove with good Holland sack for barter. These sturdy mariners
from the dyke-and-windmill country would regard the contrivance with
more critical eyes than could the red man from the bow-and-arrow
wilderness.

But we saw nothing of windmill or of palisaded village or of royal
governor; and field and meadow and woodland all seemed too sleepy to
tell us much about them. They only served to recall the tantalizing,
broken bits that the records give of the picturesque life that was
here--of colonial pomp and savage dignity, of London trade and Indian
barter, of English games and merriment, of colonial trials and
tragedies: all this of which we know, yet know so little.

And so we left the old plantation dreaming in the autumn sunshine--left
it to the poets and to the story-tellers, who seem to have adopted it.
They know how to weave the spells that bring back old manor-houses and
gallants and ladies and tall London ships and the vanished scenes of
love and of war. The place belongs to them; old Fleur de Hundred--half
real and half ideal--an old-time bit of story-land.

CHAPTER XVIII

GADABOUT GOES TO CHURCH

It was the day before Thanksgiving when the houseboat Gadabout, with
her good-byes all said, fished up her anchor from the river bottom in
front of Weyanoke, and started off to find another place to drop it
farther up the stream. She was ready for the holiday. The material for
her Thanksgiving dinner was all aboard: part of it canned and boxed as
the steamer had just brought it from Norfolk; and the rest of it, and
the best of it, plump and gobbling on the stern.

But Gadabout's preparations for the day had not stopped here. Not only
had she provided the season's feast, but she had diligently inquired of
her chart and of her neighbours where she might take her family to
church. The chart had told her of a little stream, called Herring
Creek, a few miles farther up the James, and had shown her a mark upon
the bank of the creek that it called Westover Church. The neighbours
had said that the chart was right; and had added that the church was a
colonial one still in use, and doubtless Thanksgiving services would be
held there. Fortunately, Herring Creek was a stream that Gadabout had
intended running into anyway, as it would be t