aven or earth but
justified draughts of Madeira.

The room filled with a blue and fragrant mist proceeding from twenty
pipe-bowls. Mr. Peyton sang a pretty song of his own composing. The
company applauded. Sir Charles Carew, in a richly plaintive tenor voice,
sang a lyric of Rochester's. Several of the gentlemen looked askance
(the clergyman had left the room with the ladies), but on the Governor's
crying out "Excellent!" they considered themselves over-squeamish, and
clapped loudly.

Sir Charles, being dry after his song, drank to Hospitality,--"A duty,"
he said, smiling, "that you gentlemen make so paramount that you must
wonder at the omission of 'Thou shalt be hospitable' from the
Decalogue."

"Faith, sir!" cried Mr. Peyton, "God is too good a Virginian not to
consider such a commandment superfluous."

The Governor commenced a story which all present, but one, had heard a
dozen times. It mattered the less, as it was a good one. Sir Charles
capped it with a better. The Governor told a weird tale of Lunsford's
men, the "babe-eating" regiment. Sir Charles recounted a little
adventure of His Grace of Buckingham with a quack astrologer, a Court
lady, and an orange girl, which made the company die of laughter.

"Rat me! but you tell a story well, sir!" said the Governor, wiping his
eyes.

"I serve King Charles the Second, your Excellency."

"And so have to live by your wit, eh, sir?"

"Precisely, your Excellency."

"Emigrate to Virginia, man! to the land of good eating, good drinking,
good fighting, stout men, and pretty women--who make angelic wives." And
the Governor, who loved his own wife with chivalric devotion, kissed a
locket which he wore at his neck. "Come to Virginia where we need loyal
men and true. Lord! we all thought the millennium was come with the
king, but damme! if it doesn't seem as far off as ever! Not that his
Majesty is to blame," he added quickly, as though fearing that his words
might be taken as an aspersion upon Charles's ability to conduct the
millennium single-handed. "The naughty spirit of the age sets itself
against the Lord's Anointed. The Puritan snake is but scotched, not
killed. It's the old prate of freedom of conscience, government by the
people, and the like disgusting stuff (no offense to you, Major
Carrington) that makes the trouble of the times both here and at home. I
sigh for the good old days when, for eleven sweet years, no Parliament
sat to meddle in affairs of stat