Page:Memorials of a Southern Planter.djvu/73



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In entering on this pioneer life many difficulties had to be met that were a new experience to people coming from lower Virginia. One of the first was the unavoidable delay in getting supplies of meat for the servants. For two weeks after their arrival they had none. Sophia's sister Emmeline, Mrs. Lewis Smith, was so conscientious that she refused during this period to touch a morsel of meat, although the supply on hand was ample to last the white families till more could be procured.

The roof of the house in which Thomas had to put his wife and children was so leaky, that he had sometimes at night when it rained to sit up in bed and hold an umbrella over her and the baby.

There were then no railroads, and the cotton crop had to be hauled in wagons forty miles, to Grand Gulf. The roads were so bad that to trust the teams to negro-drivers alone was not to be thought of, and the master went with every wagon.

Not more than a quarter of a mile from Thomas's home, in those early days in Mississippi, lived a man named Jack Cotton. He was one of a band of highwaymen who infested the road from Vicksburg to Memphis. Their practice was to waylay planters and rob them on their return from selling their cotton. Jack Cotton's house was a half-way station and a rendezvous for the band. Jack was civil to the new neighbors, and they were ignorant of his reputation as a desperado till he ran away to Texas to escape the law.

There was no doctor or church nearer than Raymond, which was ten miles from Burleigh. The country people around the plantation, seeing that Thomas knew how to take care of his servants, began to send for him