Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/392

 rain, every room of the four, except only that used as her bed-room, was completely afloat. Some detached log houses, at a little distance on either side, served as additional sleeping rooms, and others, a little in the rear, as kitchen and storehouses; and still farther back, but still in sight of the principal mansion, was a long string of miserable little huts, the town, as they called it, occupied by the plantation slaves. As to shrubbery, there were no enclosures at all about the house, except one, half decayed, of what seemed to have been intended as a garden, but which was now quite grown up with weeds and bushes. The hogs, the mules, a few half-starved cows, and a whole bevy of naked negro children, ranged freely about the house; and though there seemed once to have been some attempts at shrubbery, that was now all ruined and destroyed.

The former Mrs Thomas, belonging, as she always took pains to let the company know, to one of the first families of Virginia, was in fact a very notable woman, whose masculine temper and active spirit had counterbalanced, so far as domestic affairs were concerned, the dozy disposition of her husband. By dint of bustling, scolding, and the free use of the cowhide, which she wielded with a grace and dexterity hardly to be attained except by those females who have had the advantage of a thoroughly southern education in the best families, she had contrived to keep things in tolerable order; but shortly after her death, some six years before, the man whom she had employed to keep the garden and the grounds about the house, had been taken off and placed in the cotton field, and every thing in the house and around it had since been left to take care of itself; and with the results that might have been expected, there not being in the house a whole piece of furniture of any description, and the entire aspect of things as untidy, uncomfortable, neglected, and dilapidated as can well be imagined.

To complete the dismay of Mrs Thomas, and what