Madam Cavendish was still in her bedchamber, and the two sisters and
I dined together in the great hall. Then, after the meal was over, I
went forth with my book of Sir William Davenant's plays, and sought
a favourite place of mine in the woods, and stayed there till
sundown. Then, rising and going homeward when the mist floated over
the marshlands like veils of silver gauze, and the frogs chorused
through it in waves of sound, and birds were circling above it,
calling sweetly with fluting notes or screaming with the harsh
trumpet-clang of sea-fowl, I heard of a sudden, just as the sun sank
below the western sky, a mighty din of horns and bells and voices
from the direction of Jamestown. I knew that the sports which a
certain part of the community would have on a Sabbath after sundown,
when they felt so inclined, had begun. Since the king had been
restored such sports had been observed, now and then, according to
the humour of the governor and the minister and the others in
authority. Laws had been from time to time set forth that the night
after the Sabbath, the Sabbath being considered to cease at sundown,
should be kept with decorum, but seldom were they enforced, and
often, as now, a great din arose when the first gloom overspread the
earth. However, that night was the 30th of April, the night before
May day; and there was more merrymaking in consequence, though May
was not here as in England, and even in England not what it had been
in the first Charles's reign.

But they kept up their rollicking late that night, for the window of
my chamber being toward Jamestown, and the wind that way, I could
hear them till I fell asleep. At midnight I wakened suddenly at the
sound of a light laugh, which I knew to be Mary Cavendish's. There
was never in the maid any power of secrecy when her humour overcame
her. She laughed again, and I heard a hushing voice, which I knew to