Page:Memorials of a Southern Planter.djvu/237

 Rh This was unprecedented in the South, I think. They were proud of living on his place, on account of the good name that he had won for himself as a master. Not infrequently they were heard to express a regret that they had not belonged to him when they saw the feeling that existed between himself and his former slaves. Sometimes he came to us with a puzzled look to ask who those negroes were who had just called him old master and shaken hands with him.

"I cannot recall their faces," he would say; "surely, I never owned them?"

Finally the negroes on the neighboring plantations, and wherever he went, came to call him old master. They seemed to take pride in thus claiming a relationship with him, as it were; and he grew accustomed to the voluntary homage.

He had come home to a house denuded of nearly every article of furniture, and to a plantation stripped of the means of cultivating any but a small proportion of it. A few mules and one cow comprised the stock. We had brought a few pieces of common furniture from Georgia, and a very few necessary articles were bought. In the course of time some home-made contrivances and comforts relieved the desolate appearance of the rooms, but no attempt was ever made to refurnish the house.

He owned nothing that could be turned into money without great sacrifice but five bales of cotton. There were yet two sons and two daughters to be educated. He decided to get a tutor for them, and to receive several other pupils in his house in order to make up the salary. The household was put on an economical footing. The plantation negroes were hired to work in the fields, and things seemed to promise more prosperous days. So the first year was passed.

Of this time Mammy Harriet says, "When he come from Georgia he say, 'Harriet, I cannot do as I used to do. You know I used to send whiskey to you all the time. But I cannot do that now.'

"'Yes, marster, I understan'. I don't expec' it.'

"Ah, you don't know de good dat did me! We was