Exactly at the same hour every morning the old gentleman's horse was saddled, and he entered the neighboring village so promptly as to enable some of the inhabitants to set their clocks by him.
This family had possessed great wealth in eastern Virginia during the colonial government, under which many of its members held high offices.
But impoverished by high living, entertaining company, and a heavy British debt, they had been reduced in their possessions to about fifty negroes, with only money enough to purchase this plantation, upon which they had retired from the gay and charming society of Williamsburg. They carried with them, however, some remains of their former grandeur: old silver, old jewelry, old books, old and well-trained servants, and an old English coach which was the curiosity of all other vehicular curiosities. How the family ever climbed into it, or got out of it, and how the driver ever reached the dizzy height upon which he sat, was the mystery of my childhood.
But, although egg-shaped and suspended in mid-air, this coach had doubtless, in its day, been one of considerable renown, drawn by four horses, with footman, postilion, and driver in English livery.
How sad must have been its reflections on finding itself shorn of these respectable surroundings, and, after the Revolution, drawn by two republican horses, with footman and driver dressed in republican jeans!
A great-uncle of this family, unlike the coach, never would become republicanized; and his obstinate loyalty to the English crown, with his devotion to everything English, gained for him the title "English Louis," by which name he is spoken of in the family to this day. An old lady told me not long ago that she remembered, when a child, the arrival of "English Louis" at Rustic one night, and his conversation as they sat around the fire,—how he deplored a republican form of government, and the misfortunes which would result from it, saying: "All may go smoothly for about seventy years, when civil war will set in. First it will be about these negro slaves we have around us, and after that it will be something else." And how true "English Louis'" prediction has proven.[13]
Doubtless this gentleman was avoided and proscribed on account of his English proclivities. For at that day the spirit of republicanism and hatred to England ran high; so that an old gentleman—one of our relatives whom I well remember—actually took from his parlor walls his coat-of-arms, which had been brought by his grandfather from England, and, carrying it out in his yard, built a fire, and, collecting his children around it to see it burn, said: "Thus let everything English perish!"
Should I say what I think of this proceeding I would not be considered, perhaps, a true republican patriot.
I must add a few words to my previous mention of Smithfield, in Montgomery County, the county which flows with healing waters.