she—­“be quiet, John Allgood, my speech I will have, since thou being a man hath not the tongue of one.  I pray ye, gentlemen listen to my cause of complaint.  Here my goodman and me did come to this oppressed colony of Virginia, seven years since, having together laid by fifty pound from the earnings of an inn called the Jolly Yeoman in Norfolkshire, in which for many years we had run long scores with little return, and we bought a small portion of land and planted tobacco, and set out trees.  Then came the terror of the Indians, and Governor Berkeley, always in wait for the word of the king, and doing nothing, and once was our house burned, and we escaped barely with our lives, and then came Nat Bacon, and blessings upon him, for he made the beginning of a good work.  And then did the soldiers riding to meet him, so trample down our tobacco fields with horse hoofs, that the leaves lay in a green pumice, and that crop lost.  And then this Navigation Act, which I understand but little of except that it be to fill the king’s pockets and empty ours, has made our crops of no avail, since we but sent the tobacco as a gift to the king, so little we have got in return.  And look, look!” she shrieked, “I pray ye look, and sure this is the best I have, and me always going as well attired as any of my station in England.  I pray ye look!  Sure ’tis past mending, and the stitches and the cloth go together, as will the colony, unless somewhat be done in season to mend its state.”  So saying, up she flung her arm, and all the under side of the body of her gown was in rags, and up she flung the other, and that was in like case.

Then the other woman, who was a strapping lass, and had been a barmaid ere she came to Virginia in search of a husband, where she had found one Richard Longman afraid not to do her bidding and wed her, since he was as small and mild a man as ever was, joined in:  “I say with Mistress Allgood,” she shrieked out, and flung her own buxom arms aloft with such disclosures that a roar of laughter spread through the hall, and her husband blushed purple, and a protest gurgled in his throat.  But at that his wife, who verily was a shrew, seized upon him by both of his little shoulders, and shook him until his face wagged like a rag baby with an utter limpness of helplessness, and shouted out, amid peals of laughter that seemed to shake the roof, that here was a pretty man, here forsooth was a pretty man.  Here was her own husband, who let his own lawful wife go clad in such wise and lifted not a finger!  Yes, lifted not a finger, and had to be dragged into the present doings by the very hair of his head by his wife, and that was not all.  Yes, that was not all.  Then, with that, up she flung one stout foot, and lo, a great hole was in the heel of her stocking, and the other, and then she flirted the hem of her petticoat into sight, and that was all of a fringe with rags.  “Look, look!” she shrieked out.  “I tell ye, Thomas Longman, I will have them look, and see to