Page:Once a Week Dec 1860 to June 61.pdf/299

 288 steam from a river-boat which was at a landing-place, taking in cotton and firewood. Down to the river, and away on the other side to near the horizon, was an expanse of forest so compact that it seemed as if an army might march on the tree-tops for miles. Far in the distance between the forest and the sky, appeared a wavy line of blue uplands; and here and there in the nearer regions there were clearances of some hundreds of acres, with rude paths down to the river. On our side were bluffs—two or three right and left—lifting up their limestone ledges and precipitous crests from the woods below, and affording a stretch of table-land, like that we were standing on, for cultivation. D’s plantation stretched back from the ridge above the left bank of the river, gently sloping to the south-east.

Nothing was left of the wood that could be got rid of. The house stood exposed, bare and scorched, without any shade except such as could be had by making the verandahs exceedingly wide. It looks all very pretty, it is admitted, to see a background of evergreen forest: and it sounds very tempting to go, in the hot noon, into the thickets where the ground is gay with violets, mayapple, buckeye, blue lupin, iris, and crowpoison—the fleur-de-lis of these parts: but the mosquitoes spoil everything. When one chooses one’s hour for a drive among the clustering honeysuckles and the blossoming sourwood, all alive with butterflies, and the yellow jasmine, and all the combined shrubs of the garden and trees of the forest, all is charming; but it does not do to set down one’s house among them. The negroes can live in thickets, and nestle under rows of Pride-of-India trees; but the whites would go mad with the bites and stings of insects.

So there stands the loghouse, as formerly, only with its shingled roof looking more parched and warped than ever, and the fences and gates grayer and shabbier. Anna and her young daughter Minnie are in the piazza, somewhat differently occupied. My sister has her hands dyed blue. She has been standing at a long board on trestles, cutting out woollen dresses for a score of negro women and children. D shows me her right hand, deeply marked with the rings of the large scissors, and tells me that is the way ladies have to work in the South, to which Anna appends the well-worn remark that the mistresses are more slaves than the negroes. Some old women are summoned to carry away the whole apparatus for to-day, and bring water and towel for the mistress’s hands.

I ask whether those old women could not do that sort of work. There is no such precise fit in the garments of field-hands as to require skill in dressmaking, I should think; for the clothes of all the women I see in the cotton-field might fit any one person as well as another. Why cannot the house-servants, some of whom seem to be always sewing, spare the lady all this cutting out?

It cannot be done, I am told. It is not the fit that is the question, but the economy of the material. There is no negro woman who can learn not to cut cloth to waste. Such is plantation doctrine; but it does not hold good everywhere; for negro girls dress very well, without extravagance, in some places where they have to cut out and make their own dresses.

Minnie, meantime, has been collecting her wits, carried off skyhigh by the book she has in her hand. Reclining in a corner of the wide sofa on the other side of the piazza, she has been lost in the witchery of some native magazine poetry, or the turns of a romantic story. The child has grown much, and is almost a woman,—and a very pretty one. We rarely see in the North so healthy and blooming a form and complexion as among these Southern girls who live almost constantly in the open air. This seems to do them more good than the summer heat and want of exercise do them harm. When Minnie was once so far recalled to the realities of life as to see who we were, she was so affectionate and delighted as to enable me to recognize in her the old playfellow I had been longing to greet.

“How old we are growing!” said I, when she went in to dress for dinner. “That child looks almost as old as her mother was when she married.”

“Oh! don’t talk of marrying!” exclaimed Anna. “I can’t bear to think of it.”

“Well, well! there is plenty of time yet,” said I. “She is hardly sixteen, I think.”

“Yet we have to be thinking about it, whether we will or no,” said D. “We have had some little unpleasantness with two or three of our friends lately, because we cannot give her away in a hurry, and so early.”

“My little Minnie going to marry!” I exclaimed, in amusement and wonder.

“I fear it must be before long,” her mother said. “But there is nothing in view at the moment. We have persuaded her to wait awhile, and we hope it may be some time before any youth appears who can at all correspond with her requirements; and she must have a perfect Bayard, with a good deal of the Apollo or Byron, and a likeness to the Admirable Crichton.”

“Yes. I hope she is safe, in that way,” observed D. “She is so romantic that the man does not exist—”

“I am afraid that is a false security,” said I. “What delights romantic people is not what they find, but what they make; not what they actually see, but what they believe. Minnie will probably see a Bayard and all the rest in some neighbouring youth, because the image occupies her eye.”

“That is my fear,” Anna replied. “I wish I were sure of her till her twentieth birthday. But the girls have such trains of suitors here.”

This I knew to be true, from the number of young men who leave the cities and come down from the North, to seek their fortunes on the virgin soil of the newer cotton states.

The governesses who are obtained from New England, and scattered among the planters’ houses, are usually too old to marry in a region where marriage takes place much too early. Thus, while the maidens of New England are maintaining themselves in great numbers and in various ways, the planters’ daughters are married almost before they have ceased to be children. Each mother hopes and purposes to extend the period