there was an old statute of the Colony which read,--"It shall be
permitted to none but the Council and Heads of Hundreds to wear gold
in their clothes, or to wear silk till they make it themselves." What,
then, could Miss Softdown do with the silks and breastpins brought from
London? "Let her wear deer-skin and arrow-head," said the natives. But
Miss Softdown soon had her way. Still more were these new families
shocked, when, on ringing for some newly purchased negro domestic, the
said negro came into the parlor nearly naked. Then began one of the most
extended controversies in the history of Virginia,--the question being,
whether out-door negroes should wear clothes, and domestics dress like
other people. The popular belief, in which it seems the negroes shared,
was, that the race would perish, if subjected to clothing the year
round. The custom of negro men going about _in puris naturalibus_
prevailed to a much more recent period than is generally supposed.

One by one, the barbarisms of Old Virginia were eradicated, and the
danger was then that effeminacy would succeed; but a better class of
families began to come from England, now that the Colony was somewhat
prepared for them. These aimed to make Virginia repeat England: it might
have repeated something worse, and in the end has. About one or two old
mansions in Maryland and Virginia the long silvery grass characteristic
of the English park is yet found: the seed was carefully brought from
England by those gentlemen who came under Raleigh's administration,
and who regarded their residence in these Colonies as patriotic
self-devotion. On one occasion, the writer, walking through one of
these fields, startled an English lark, which rose singing and soaring
skyward. It sang a theme of the olden time. Governor Spottswood brought
with him, when he came, a number of these larks, and made strenuous
efforts to domesticate them in the neighborhood of Fredericksburg,
Virginia. He did not succeed. Now and then we have heard of one's being
seen, companionless. It is a sad symbol of that nobler being who tried
to domesticate himself in Virginia, the fine old English gentleman. He
is now seen but little oftener than the silver grass and the lark which
he brought with him. But let no one think, whilst ridiculing those who
can now only hide their poor stature under the lion-skin of F-F-V-ism,
that the race of old Virginia gentlemen is a mythic race. Through
the fair slopes of East