VI


I have always observed with wonder and amusement and a tender
gladness the faculty with which young creatures, and particularly
young girls, can throw off their minds for the time being the weight
of cares and anxieties and bring all of themselves to bear upon
those exercises of body or mind, to no particular end of serious
gain, which we call play and frivolity. It may be that faculty is so
ordained by a wise Providence, which so keeps youth and the bloom of
it upon the earth, and makes the spring and new enterprises
possible. It may be that without it we should rust and stick fast in
our ancient rivets and bolts of use.

That very next morning, after I had learned from Mary Cavendish,
supplemented by a sulky silence of assent from Sir Humphrey Hyde,
that she had, under presence of ordering feminine finery from
England, spent all her year's income from her crops on powder and
shot for the purpose of making a stand in the contemplated
destruction of the new tobacco crops, and thereby plunged herself
and her family in a danger which were hard to estimate were it
discovered, I heard a shrill duet of girlish laughs and merry
tongues before the house. Then, on looking forth, whom should I see
but Mary Cavendish and Cicely Hyde, her great gossip, and a young
coloured wench, all washing their faces in the May dew, which lay in
a great flood as of diamonds and pearls over everything. I minded
well the superstition, older than I, that, if a maid washed her face
in the first May dew, it would make her skin wondrous fair, and I
laughed to myself as I peeped around the shutter to think that Mary