ats, broad tuckers and Mechlin ruffles, high-heeled shoes and
handsome buckles, powdered wigs and powdered puffs, and crescent beauty
patches.

Evidently, by colonial time, twilight was coming on; for now the
fragrant bayberry candles were lighted. There was the faint tinkle of a
harpsichord. Dim figures moved in the stately minuet; their curtsies,
punctiliously in keeping with the last word from London, were "slow and
low."

Little groups gathered about the card tables, where fresh candles and
ivory counters were waiting. Lovers found their way to deep
window-seats; and lovers of yet another sort to brimming glasses and
colonial toasts, and perhaps to wigs awry.

It was the old-time Shirley, the strange, incongruous Shirley that was
a bright bit of English manor life within; and, without, wilderness and
savages and tobacco-fields and Africans. In from the life of the old
messuage, came a touch of the barbaric; weird minor songs that belonged
with the hot throb of the African tom-tom floated in through the deep
windows, and strangely mingled with the thin tinkle of the harpsichord
and the tender strains of an old English ballad.

The green bayberry candles grew dim, and in their fragrant smoke the
old colonials faded away. Our visit at Shirley was over.

Out in the quadrangle, we turned for a last look at the homestead, and
were almost forced to doubt that old colonial scene that we had just
left within. There stood the fine buildings in perfect preservation,
insisting at last as they had insisted at first that this matter of old
age was but a huge mistake--that they had been built but yesterday.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE END OF THE VOYAGE

Before daylight on the following morning Gadabout was awake and astir.
She had resolved to catch the early tide and finish her James River
cruise that day by a final run to the head of navigation at Richmond.

For the last time the clacking windlass was calling the sleeping anchor
from its bed in the river; the Commodore was hanging out the
sailing-lights; and Nautica (who could not find the dividers) was
stepping off the distance to Richmond on the chart with a hairpin.

How dreary a start before dawn sounds to a landsman! The hated early
call; the hasty breakfast with coffee-cup in one hand and time-table in
the other; the dismal drive through dull, sleeping streets; the
cheerless station; the gloomy train-shed with its lines of coaches
wrapped in acrid engine smoke.