"Talkinge with the King by chance I tould him of the Virginia squirrills which they say will fly, whereof there are now divers brought into England, and hee presently and very earnestly asked mee if none of them was provided for him, sayinge that hee was sure you would gett him one of them. I would not have trobled you with this but that you know so well how he is affected by these toyes, and with a little enquiry of any of your folkes you may furnish yourself to present him att his comminge to London which will not bee before Wensday next: the Monday before Theobald's and the Saterday before that to Royston. Your lordships most assuredly, "to doo your service, "H. SOUTHAMPTON." Captain Smith indulged himself in writing an imprudent, sharp letter to the "Right Honourables" in London. He entitled his epistle "A Rude Answer," in which he exhibited in caustic terms the preposterous folly of expecting a present profitable return from Virginia. As to gold, he had from the first discouraged all hope of it. The pieced barge for the South Sea? That, at least, was a feasible project. True, it could not be borne many hundreds of miles and over mountains on the backs of his men, but he could burn it and have the ashes carried over in a bag! He then rallies the company for its prodigality in giving Newport a hundred pounds a year for carrying news, and informs them that he sends Ratcliffe home lest the colonists should cut his throat. All this did but little good to our captain, as he had cause to realize afterward. "Had Newport suspected the character of the Rude answer," says Cooke, "it is probable he would have dropped it into the Atlantic. But he duly took it to England and the Right Honourables no doubt gasped at its truculence." CHAPTER XV In December, 1608, there were two hundred men within the palisades at Jamestown; already, although the weather was delightful, "affrighted with famine." The little wooded peninsula, small and marshy as it was, might with proper foresight and industry have yielded corn and garden products, but as Captain Smith in his "Rude Answer" had stated: "The one-half of us are sicke, the other little better. Our diet is usually a little meale and water, and not sufficient of that. Though there be fish in the sea, fowles in the aire, and beasts in the woods, their bounds are so large, they so wilde, and we so weake and ignorant, we cannot trouble them. And we must long lodge and feed the men you send before they can be made good for anything. In over-toyling our weake unskilful bodies, we can scarce recover ourselves from one supply to another. If you would send out carpenters, husbandmen and diggers-up of trees' roots, they would be worth more than a thousand of such as we have."