execrably brutal, and in the drag-net of the law might be found many merely
unfortunate, many perhaps finer than the law.

Virginia thus was founded and established. An English people moved through
her forests, crossed in boats her shining waters, trod the lanes of hamlets
builded of wood but after English fashions. Climate, surrounding nature,
differed from old England, and these and circumstance would work for
variation. But the stock was Middlesex, Surrey, Devon, and all the other
shires of England. Scotchmen came also, Welshmen, and, perhaps as early as
this, a few Irish. And there were De La Warr's handful of Poles and
Germans, and several French vinedressers.

Political and economic life was taking form. That huge, luxurious,
thick-leafed, yellow-flowered crop, alike comforting and extravagant, that
tobacco that was in much to mould manners and customs and ways of looking
at things, was beginning to grow abundantly. In 1620, forty thousand pounds
of tobacco went from Virginia to England; two years later went sixty
thousand pounds. The best sold at two shillings the pound, the inferior for
eighteen pence. The Virginians dropped all thought of sassafras and
clapboard. Tobacco only had any flavor of Golconda.

At this time the rich soil, composed of layer on layer of the decay of
forests that had lived from old time, was incredibly fertile. As fast as
trees could be felled and dragged away, in went the tobacco. Fields must
have laborers, nor did these need to be especially intelligent. Bring in
indentured men to work. Presently dream that ships, English as well as
Dutch, might oftener load in Africa and sell in Virginia, to furnish the
dark fields with dark workers! In Dale's time had begun the making over of
land in fee simple; in Yeardley's time every "ancient" colonist--that is
every man who had come to Virginia before 1616--was given a goodly number