Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/438

of venerable rectory-houses and substantial homesteads of yeomen, must have found themselves slightly dépaysé at first in that new and unfamiliar world. They sat down to rough boards that were plentifully spread; but in place of the sirloin and the plum-pudding, they had haunches of forest venison and briskets of bear, with terrapin and bay-oysters and canvas-back ducks by way of delicacies to follow the pièces de résistance. In the way of the field-sports in which the English gentleman delighted, there was enough and to spare. But at first, at least, there were no packs of heavy fox-hounds and slow-winded harriers leisurely puzzling out a scent in the familiar coverts and coppices. There were no roughly shorn stubbles with coveys of partridges, or furze-brakes honeycombed with rabbit-burrows. On the other hand, there was deer-stalking and still-shooting in the gloomy silence of interminable woods, and there were fierce hounds to bring the shaggy bears to bay, and to hunt down the wolves which infested the cattle-pens. As a rule, the colonists and the Indians were not on unfriendly terms; but there was always the chance of being ambushed by some hot-tempered red patriot, and shot down as a poacher on his hereditary hunting-grounds. As in the eastern counties of England, there were sedgy meres, that in the season were swarming with water-fowl; but the swamps of Virginia were very different from the fens or broads of Norfolk or Lincoln. The fowler need not penetrate their recesses unless he pleased; but if he chose to go, he did his shooting in the shadow of death, treading at each step over mysterious dangers. He forced his way through luxuriant thickets of tangled reeds, over putrid and pestilential slime. Poisonous snakes curled round the roots of the trees, from which they were scarcely to be distinguished. He set his foot on a rough and slippery log, it slipped from beneath him, and lo, it was an alligator! Nor need it be said that those primeval swamps, with their dense growths of foul and fetid vegetation, bred the most deadly fevers and agues. They were dangerous at all hours; but if the sportsman were belated, he was sure to pay the inevitable penalty. As a minor drawback, there were clouds of venomous mosquitoes, and all manner of flies that bit and stung. Fortunately the antidote or the alleviation was near the bane, and many a settler who venerated the memory of Raleigh must have doubly blessed him for discovering the virtues of tobacco. Virginia ran Cuba hard as the tobacconists’ Garden of Eden. In the swamps, as in the mid-day siestas, and in the cooler hours of the listless evenings that succeeded the sultry days, the colonists took to indefatigable smoking, and began to indulge in swinging hammocks, with brimming tankards of sangaree convenient to their elbows.

For, though a fair land and a fertile, it was somewhat enervating. The Virginian colonists kept the courage of their race, and cherished the chivalrous traditions of the English Cavalier and Churchman, but they never developed the indomitable energy of their hardier kinsfolk in New England. There were rich returns for small labour, but the labour was toilsome and exhausting. Even in these latitudes no white man handling the axe and the hoe could stand the noonday heat with impunity. The soil yielded abundant crops with merely superficial cultivation; but when the land was grubbed and cleared, unless it were kept clean, the weeds and the jungle grew