to open the boxes; Magdalen Brant and Dorothy
Varick, each resting a hand on my shoulder to steady them, peeped
curiously down to see. And, "Oh!" cried everybody, as the lifted
box-lids discovered snow-white pigeons sitting on great gilt eggs.

The white pigeons fluttered out, some to the table, where they craned
their necks and ruffled their snowy plumes; others flapped up to the
loop-holes, where they sat and watched us.

"Break the eggs!" cried the patroon.

I broke mine; inside was a pair of shoe-roses, each set with a pearl and
clasped with a gold pin.

Betty Austin clapped her hands in delight; Dorothy bent double, tore off
the silken roses from each shoe in turn, and I pinned on the new
jewelled roses amid a gale of laughter.

"A health to the patroon!" cried Sir George Covert, and we gave it with
a will, glasses down. Then all settled to our seats once more to hear
Sir George sing a song.

A slave passed him a guitar; he touched the strings and sang with good
taste a song in questionable taste:

"Jeanneton prend sa faucille."

A delicate melody and neatly done; yet the verse--

"Le deuxieme plus habile
L'embrassant sous le menton"--

made me redden, and the envoi nigh burned me alive
with blushes, yet was rapturously applauded, and the
patroon fell a-choking with his gross laughter.

Then Walter Butler would sing, and, I confess, did
it well, though the song was sad and the words too
melancholy to please.

"I know a rebel song," cried Colonel Claus. "Here,
give me that fiddle and I'll fiddle it, dammy if I don't--ay,
and sing it, too!"

In a shower of gibes and laughter the fiddle was
fetched, and the Indian fighter seized the bow and drew
a most distressful strain, singing in a whining voice:

"Come hearken to a bloody tale,
Of how the soldiery
Did murder men in Boston,
As you full soon shall see.
It came to pass on March the fifth
Of seventeen-seventy,
A regiment, the twenty-ninth.
Provoked a sad affray!"

"Chorus!" shouted Captain Campbell, beating time:

"Fol-de-rol-de-rol-de-ray--
Provoked a sad affray!"

"That's not in the song!" protested Colonel Claus, but everybody sang it
in whining tones.

"Continue!" cried Captain Campbell, amid a burst of laughter. And Claus
gravely drew his fiddle-bow across the strings and sang:

"In King Street, by the Butcher's Hall
The soldiers on us fell,