The wainscoted and panelled walls glowed with greenery. Holly hung over the carved oaken chimneys, and around the fowling pieces and antlers of the chase that betokened the hunting habits of Colonel Hancock. Silver tankards marked with the family arms sparkled on the damask table cloth, and silver candlesticks and snuffers and silver plate. Myrtleberry wax candles gave out an incense that mingled with the odour of hickory snapping in the fireplace.
"Exactly as her mother looked," whispered the grandmother when Judy came down,—grandmother, a brisk little white-capped old lady in quilted satin, who remembered very well the mother of Washington.
The stars hung blazing on the rim of the Blue Ridge and the snow glistened, when out of the great house came the sound of music and dancing. There were wedding gifts after the old Virginia fashion, and when all had been inspected Clark handed his bride a small jewel case marked with her name.
The cover flew open, revealing a set of topaz and pearls, "A gift from the President."
Out into the snow went these wedding guests of a hundred years ago, to scatter and be forgotten.
IV
THE BOAT HORN
All the romance of the old boating time was in Clark's wedding trip down the Ohio. It was on a May morning when, stepping on board a flatboat at Louisville, he contrasted the daintiness of Julia with that of any other travelling companion he had ever known.
The river, foaming over its rocky bed, the boatmen blowing their long conical bugles from shore to shore, the keelboats, flat-bottoms, and arks loaded with emigrants all intent on "picking guineas from gooseberry bushes," spoke of youth, life, action. Again the boatman blew his bugle, echoes of other trumpets answered, "Farewell, farewell, fare—we-ll." Soon they were into the full sweep of the pellucid Ohio, mirroring skies and shores dressed in the livery of Robin Hood.
Frowning precipices and green islets arose, and projecting headlands indenting the Ohio with promontories like a chain of shining lakes. Hills clothed in ancient timber, hoary whitened sycamores draped in green clusters of mistletoe, and magnificent groves of the dark green sugar tree reflected from the water below. Shut in to the water's edge, a woody wilderness still, the river glided between its umbrageous shores.
Now and then the crowing of cocks announced a clearing where the axe of the settler had made headway, or some old Indian mound blossomed with a peach orchard. Flocks of screaming paroquets alighted in the treetops, humming birds whizzed into the honeysuckle vines and flashed away with dewdrops on their jewelled throats.