Page:The Berkeleys and their neighbors.djvu/13

 future. The public, too, was fully acquainted with the state of affairs, and the fact that there was any gold at all in the bag, would eventually be in the nature of a pleasant surprise.

The people, in carriages, or on horseback, bore little resemblance to the usual country gathering. They were gentlepeople tinged with rusticity. All of them had good, high sounding Anglo-Saxon names. There was some magnificence of an antique pattern. One huge family ark was drawn by four sleek old horses, with a venerable black coachman on the box, and inside a superb old lady with a black veil falling over her white hair. There were but two really correct equipages in the field. One was, a trim, chocolate-colored victoria, with brown horses and a chocolate-colored coachman to match. In it sat a showy woman, with a profusion of dazzling blonde hair, and beside her was an immaculately well dressed blonde man. The turnout looked like a finely finished photograph among a lot of dingy old family portraits.

The other carriage that would have passed muster, was a large and handsome landau, respectfully called "the Isleham carriage," and in it sat Colonel Berkeley and his daughter Olivia. The Colonel was a genuine Virginia colonel, and claimed to be the last man in the State to wear a ruffled shirt bosom. A billowy expanse of thread cambric ruffles rushed out of his waistcoat; his snow white hair was carefully combed down upon his coat collar. At the carriage door stood his double—an elderly ne