y. I often wonder why the lecture is not
used more as a means of escape from hostile people.

[Illustration: THE REHEARSAL.]

By writing a letter and getting a reply to it, he made another hit. He
now became a great man among the Indians; and to kill a dog and fail to
invite Smith to the symposium was considered as vulgar as it is now to
rest the arctic overshoe on the corner of the dining-table while
buckling or unbuckling it.

Afterward Smith fell into the hands of Powhatan, the Croker of his time,
and narrowly saved his life, as we have seen, through the intervention
of Pocahontas.

Smith was now required in England to preside at a dinner given by the
Savage Club, and to tell a few stories of life in the Far West.

While he was gone the settlement became a prey to disease and famine.
Some were killed by the Indians while returning from their club at
evening; some became pirates.

The colony decreased from four hundred and ninety to sixty people, and
at last it was moved and seconded that they do now adjourn. They started
away from Jamestown without a tear, or hardly anything else, having
experienced a very dull time there, funerals being the only relaxation
whatever.

But moving down the bay they met Lord Delaware, the new Governor, with a
lot of Christmas-presents and groceries. Jamestown was once more saved,
though property still continued low. The company, by the terms of its
new charter, became a self-governing institution, and London was only
too tickled to get out of the responsibility. It is said that the only
genuine humor up to that time heard in London was spent on the jays of
Jamestown and the Virginia colony.

Where is that laughter now? Where are the gibes and _bon-mots_ made at
that sad time?

They are gone.

All over that little republic, so begun in sorrow and travail, there
came in after-years the dimples and the smiles of the prosperous child
who would one day rise in the lap of the mother-country, and, asserting
its rights by means of Patrick O'Fallen Henry and others, place a large
and disagreeable fire-cracker under the nose of royalty, that, busting
the awful stillness, should jar the empires of earth, and blow the
unblown noses of future kings and princes. (This is taken bodily from a
speech made by me July 4, 1777, when I was young.--THE AUTHOR.)

Pocahontas was married in 1613. She was baptized the day before. Whoever
thought of that was a bright and thoughtful thinker. She stoo