It is difficult to understand that, while custom and outward observance, friendship, lineage, and close commercial ties bound the colony to England, forces, of which neither was conscious, were silently at work to separate them forever. And this without the stimulus of discontent arising from poverty or want. It was a time of the most affluent abundance. The common people lived in the greatest comfort, as far as food was concerned. Fish and flesh, game, fruits, and flowers, were poured at their feet from a liberal horn-of-plenty. Deer, coming down from the mountains to feed upon the mosses that grew on the rocks in the rivers, were shot for the sake of their skins only, until laws had to be enforced lest the decaying flesh pollute the air. Painful and hazardous as were the journeys, the traveller always encumbered himself with abundant provision for the inner man. When the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe accomplished the perilous feat of reaching the summit of the Blue Ridge Mountains, they had the honor of drinking King George's health in "Virginia red wine, champagne, brandy, shrub, cider, canary, cherry punch, white wine, Irish usquebaugh, and two kinds of rum,"--all of which they had managed to carry along, keeping a sharp lookout all day for Indians, and sleeping on their arms at night. A few years later we find Peter Jefferson ordering from Henry Wetherburn, innkeeper, the biggest bowl of arrack punch ever made, and trading the same with William Randolph for two hundred acres of land. We are not surprised to find that life was a brief enjoyment. Little Mary Ball, demurely reading from the tombstones in the old St. Stephen's church, had small occasion for arithmetic beyond the numbers of thirty or forty years--at which age, having "Piously lived and comfortably died, leaving the sweet perfume of a good reputation," these light-hearted good livers went to sleep behind their monuments. Of course the guardians of the infant colony spent many an anxious hour evolving schemes for the control of excessive feasting and junketing. The clergy were forced to ignore excesses, not daring to reprove them for fear of losing a good living. Their brethren across the seas cast longing eyes upon Virginia. It was an age of intemperance. The brightest wits of England, her poets and statesmen, were "hard drinkers." "All my hopes terminate," said Dean Swift in 1709, "in being made Bishop of Virginia." There the Dean, had he been so inclined, could hope for the high living and hard drinking which were in fashion. There, too, in the tolerant atmosphere of a new country, he might--who knows?--have felt free to avow his marriage with the unhappy Stella.