For women, life in town was pleasant enough with its tea-drinkings, its afternoon visits, and its evening assemblies, but on the plantations far from neighbors time must often have hung heavy on their hands. Yet even there, pleasures could be found, or made. When evening shut down over the lonely manor-houses along the Chesapeake, the myrtleberry candles were lighted, the slender-legged mahogany tables drawn out, and the Colonial dames seated themselves to an evening of cards. Small stakes were played for to heighten the interest of “Triumph, Ruff and Honors,” “Gleke,” or “Quadrille;” and when these lost their charm, there was the spinet to turn to.
In those primitive days people still loved melody. “A little music” was called for with enthusiasm, and given without hesitation. There was no scientific criticism to be feared when the young men and maidens “raised a tune.” Their list of songs was not long; but familiarity lent a deeper charm than novelty. “Gaze not on Swans” was a favorite in the seventeenth century. “Push about the Brisk Bowl,” while well enough at the hunt supper table, was banished from the drawing-room in favor of “Beauty, Retire!” a song beginning—
“Beauty, retire! thou dost my pitty move;
Believe my pitty and then trust my love.”
The writer does not make it quite clear why he wishes Beauty to retire, nor why she moves his pity. In fact, the case seems quite reversed in the last stanza:
“With niew and painfulle arts
Of studied warr I breake the hearts
Of half the world; and shee breakes mine;
And shee, and shee, and shee breakes mine!”
Through the lapse of more than one century, we hear the echo of those young voices, rising and falling in the air and counter of the quaint old melodies.
Oh, those shadowy corners of candle-lighted rooms, those spinets, those duos and trios, those ruffled squires and brocaded dames!—where are they now?