Of course we cannot know the names of her best friends. Her social position entitled her to intimacy with the sisters of any or all of the "gallants" we have named. She might have known Jane Randolph, already giving her heart to plain Peter Jefferson, and destined to press to her bosom the baby fingers that grew to frame the Declaration of Independence; or Sarah Winston, whose brilliant talents flashed in such splendor from the lips of Patrick Henry; or ill-starred Evelyn Byrd, whose beauty had fired the sluggish veins of George II and inspired a kingly pun upon her name, "Much have I heard, lady, of thy fair country, but of the beauty of its birds I know but now,"--all these and more; to say nothing of the mother of Sally and Molly Cary, of Lucy Grymes, of Betsy Fauntleroy, and of Mary Bland, each of whom has been claimed by Lossing and others to be the Lowland beauty, to whom her illustrious son wrote such wonderful sonnets, but quite impossible in the case of Mary Bland, seeing she was born in 1704, and was some years older than his mother. They were a light-hearted band of maidens in these pre-Revolutionary days in the "Old Dominion!" They had no dreams sadder than mystic dreams on bride's cake, no duties except those imposed by affection, no tasks too difficult, no burdens too heavy. They sang the old-time songs, and danced the old-time dances, and played the old-time English games around the Christmas fires, burning nuts, and naming apple seeds, and loving their loves "with an A or a B," even although my Lady Castlemaine, of whom no one could approve, had so entertained her very doubtful friends a hundred years before. They had the Pyrrhic dances, but they had the Pyrrhic phalanx as well! The "nobler and manlier lessons" were not forgotten in all the light-hearted manners of the age. CHAPTER XI THE TOAST OF THE GALLANTS OF HER DAY