brilliantly decorated than those Southern mansions. The names of Brandon, and Berkeley, and Westover, and Mont Clare, and Doughoregan call up the procession of guests who have walked, and danced, and dined, and slept under their roofs. We see stately men, in lace and ruffles, pacing the minuet with powdered dames, in “teacup time of hood and hoop, and when the patch was worn.” We see lovers and maidens, brides and bridegrooms spending the honeymoon under the sheltering trees, and patriot Continentals arming in their halls for the struggle with the enemies of their country.

Not the lofty alone, but the lowly as well, could claim a welcome at those always open doors. Indians, half-breeds, and leather-clad huntsmen hung round the kitchen of Greenaway Court, while Washington and Lord Fairfax dined in the saloon. Not even acquaintance was considered necessary to ensure a cordial reception. “The inhabitants,” wrote Beverly, “are very courteous to travellers, who need no other recommendation than being human creatures. A stranger has no more to do but to inquire upon the road where any gentleman or good housekeeper lives, and there he may depend upon being received with hospitality. This good-nature is so general among their people, that the gentry, when they go abroad, order their principal servants to entertain all visitors with everything the plantation affords; and the poor planters who have but one bed, will often sit up, or lie upon a form, or couch, all night, to make room for a weary traveller to repose himself after his journey.”

In Winter, the fire blazed high on the hearth, and the toddy hissed in the noggin; in Summer, the basket of fruit stood in the breeze-swept hall, and lightly clad black boys tripped in, bearing cool tankards of punch and sangaree. The guest need only enter in, to be at home. No one was considered so contemptible, as he who consented to receive money for entertaining visitors. Keeping an inn or “ordinary” was looked upon askance, and the law dealt with the proprietor rigorously, as with one who probably would cheat if he got a chance. His charges were carefully regulated, and he was subject to fine, and even imprisonment, if he went beyond them. A Maryland statute provides that “noe Ordinary-Keeper within this Province shall at any Time charge anything to account for Boles of Punch, but shall only Sell the Severall Ingredients to the Said Mixture according to the Rates before in this Act Ascertained.” A traveller, in those good old days, might ride from Maryland to Georgia, and never put up at an Ordinary at all, sure, whenever he wished to stop by the way, of a cordial welcome at a private house. Some planters even kept negroes posted at their gate, to give warning of a rider’s approach, that he might be invited in, and that the household might be in readiness to receive him.

Such promiscuous hospitality could only exist in a community with a happy faculty for taking life easily, an ability to dispense with the slavery to method, and to be contented though things went wrong. The fastidious European found some of the manners and customs a little trying. “In private houses as well as inns,” writes a traveller, “several people are crowded together in the same room; and in the latter it very commonly happens that after you have been some time in bed, a stranger of any condition comes into the room, pulls off his clothes, and places himself without ceremony between your sheets.”

Another visitor says that the Virginia houses are spacious, but the apartments are not commodious, “and they make no ceremony of putting three or four persons into the same room, nor do these make any objections to being thus heaped together.”

The Colonial Cavalier was gregarious by nature. He was warmly social, and, being so much shut off by plantation life from intercourse with his fellows, he welcomed a guest as a special providence, to relieve the monotony of his life. The gentleman-planter in affluent circumstances had nothing to do, and he did it in a very leisurely way. His occupations were such as could be shared by a guest. An observant traveller has left us a vivid picture of the daily routine of such an individual: “He rises about nine o’clock. He may perhaps make an excursion to walk as far as his stable to see his horses, which is seldom more than fifty yards from his house. He returns to breakfast between nine and ten, which is generally tea or coffee, bread and butter, and very thin slices of venison, ham, or hung beef. He then lies down on a pallet on the floor in the coolest room in the house, in his shirt and trousers only, with a negro at his head, and another to fan him and keep off the flies. Between twelve and one, he takes a draught of toddy or bombo, a liquor composed of water, sugar, rum and nutmeg, which is made weak, and kept cool. He dines between two and three, and at every table, whatever else there may be, a ham and greens, or cabbage, is always a standing dish. At dinner he drinks cider, toddy, punch, port, claret, and Madeira, which is generally excellent here. Having drunk some few glasses of wine after dinner, he returns to his pallet, with his two blacks to fan him, and continues to drink toddy or sangaree all the afternoon. He does not always drink tea. Between nine and ten in the evening, he eats a light supper of milk and fruit or wine, sugar and fruit, etc., and almost immediately retires to bed for the night.”

All this sounds as if Smyth must have made his visit to Virginia in midsummer, and fancied that the habits were the same all the year round, as in that semi-tropical season. As a picture, it is truer of Carolina than of any section farther North. As we go South we find the character more indolent, the energies more relaxed, and even the houses changing their expression. The stately brick manor-houses, modelled on the English mansion, with their deep mullioned windows and heavy doors, give place to Italian villas, with white pillars and porches gleaming from their green points of land up and down the rivers. Under this shady porch the planter might lie at his ease, watching the boats on the streams as they come and go, and breathing the perfume from the garden at his feet. The garden of those days was laid out also on the Italian pattern, in shapes of horseshoes, or stars, or palm-leaves, with avenues leading down bordered by tulips trees, with box-hedged paths, wherein Corydon and Phyllis might wander, quite hidden from the lounger on the portico. In its centre stood often a summer-house, where successive generations plighted troth, and exchanged love-tokens. Everything about the garden, as about the house, suggested England. The lawn was sown with the seed of the silvery grass, so familiar in the great English parks. Even birds were imported from the mother country. When Spotswood came over, he brought with him a number of larks to delight his ears with their familiar strain, but either the climate was unpropitious, or the stronger native birds resented the coming of the foreigners, for the larks died out, and left only here and there a lonely descendant to startle the traveller as he rode along the solitary forest roads at sunrise, with a flow of melody that called up the leafy lanes of the old home.