Sometimes, Bob lightened his labours by having a member of his following carry a pail or the mail-bag. This worked badly; for it was only by such badges of office that we were able to tell which was Bob. But after several small coins had gone into the wrong ragged hats, Bob grasped the situation; and, in a masterly way, solved the question of identity without losing the services of his satellites. Henceforth, when we heard the chattering boys coming through the woods, if we looked out promptly enough, we would see Bob relieving some one of his doubles of pail or mail-bag; and by the time he reached the houseboat, he would be in full possession of all means of identification.
"Would you like to go to meet the ladies and gentlemen on the walls?" Mrs. Bransford asked one day at Shirley.
The invitation was accepted with as much alacrity as if we had feared that the reception hours were almost over. But there was really no need of haste; for the lines of notables on Shirley's walls stand there from generation to generation, yet receiving always with such dignity and courtesy as permit not the slightest sign of weariness or expression of being bored.
In meeting those old-time owners and lovers of Shirley, the visitor is passed from one hand-clasp to another, as it were, down through the generations of colonial times.
Giving precedence to age, we made our first fancied obeisance before two distinguished looking people who, however, did not seem entitled to any consideration whatever on the ground of age, being both in the prime of life. And yet, these were Colonel and Mrs. Edward Hill, second of the name at Shirley, and the first master and mistress of the present manor-house.
We were a little surprised at the Colonel's appearance; for he was clean shaven and wore a wig. Now, we had been hobnobbing long enough with those beginners of our country—Captain John Smith, Sir Edwin Sandys, Lord Delaware, and the rest—to know that they were a bearded set and hadn't a wig amongst them.
Fortunately, we remembered in time that this portrait-gentleman, old as he was, did not quite reach back to the days of those first settlers; and that he had lived to see the great change of fashion (in the reign of Charles II) that made Englishmen for generations whiskerless and bewigged.
Though our land was settled by bearded men, with just the hair on their heads that Nature gave them (and sometimes, when the Indians were active, not all of that), yet the country was developed and made independent and set up as a nation by smooth-faced men, most fuzzily bewigged. That reign of the razor that began in the days of Colonel Hill, was a long one, and, later, determined the appearance of the Father of our Country. Imagine George Washington with a Van Dyck beard!
Of course it was bad form for us to stand there staring at the Colonel while we reasoned out all this matter of the beards and the wigs. Now the Commodore, at a suggestion from Nautica's elbow, shifted to the other foot and cleared his throat to say something. But what was there to say? It is a little trying, this meeting people who cannot converse intelligently upon anything that has happened since the seventeenth century.
At last, we murmured something about Charles II; and, to make sure, let the murmuring run over a little into the reigns of James II and of William and Mary, and then passed on; though the Commodore felt there should have been at least some slight allusion to the pyramids and the cave-dwellers.