d goods, and was anxious to lose
no more time about that than I could avoid.

I was set upon Major Robert Beverly's tomb as a most desirable
hiding place for them, and knowing that there was a meeting of the
Assembly that evening at the governor's, to discuss some matters in
private before he sailed for England, Major Beverly being clerk, I
thought that before the moon was up would be a favourable time for
the removal, but I could not move the goods alone, remembering how
those sturdy sailors tugged at them, and not deeming it well to get
any aid from the slaves.

So I rode straight to Barry Upper Branch, and a handsome black woman
in a flaunting gown, with a great display of beads, and an orange
silk scarf twisted about her head, came to parley with me, and told
me that both the brothers were away, and added that she thought I
should find them at the tavern.

The tavern was a brick building abounding in sharp slants of roof,
and dimmed in outline by a spreading cloud of new-leaved branches,
and there was one great honey-locust which was a marvel to be
seen, and hummed with bees with a mighty drone as of all the
spinning-wheels in the country, and the sweetness of it blew down
upon one passing under, like a wind of breath. And before the tavern
were tied, stamping and shaking their heads for the early flies,
many fine horses, and among them Parson Downs' and the Barry
brothers', and from within the tavern came the sound of laughter in
discordant shouts, and now and then a snatch of a song. Then a great
hoarse rumble of voice would cap the rest, telling some loose story,
then the laughter would follow--enough, it seemed, to make the roof
shake--and all the time the hum of the bees in the honey-locust
outside went on. Verily at that time in Virginia, with all the
spirit of the people in a ferment of rebellion against the
established order of things, being that same ferment which the
ardour of Nathaniel Bacon had set in motion, and which, so far as
I see now, was the beginning of an epoch of history, there was
nothing after all, no plotting nor counterplotting, no fierce
inveighing against authority, nor reckless carousing on the brinks
of precipices, which could for a second stay the march of the
mightiest force of all--the spring which had returned in its
majesty of victory, for thousands of years, and love which had
come before that.

I tied my horse with the others, with a tight halter, for he was apt
to pick qu