Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/87

 offend me. Be obedient, my boy, and do your task, and 1 will ensure you plenty to eat, enough clothes, and more indulgence than you will be likely to get from any other master." Such was the amount of major Thornton's lecture, which, it took him however, some five or six hours to get through with.

It was late in the evening before we arrived at Oakland, — for that was the name of major Thornton's property. The house was of brick, with wooden porticos. It was not large, but neat and very handsome, and presented many more appearances of substantial comfort than are to be found about most of the houses of Virginia. 'The grounds around it, were prettily laid out, and ornamented with flowers and shrubbery, — a thing quite uncommon, and which I had seldom seen before. At a distance, on a fine swell, were the servants' cabins, built of brick, neat and substantial; not placed in a straight line, but clustered together in manner that had something picturesque about it. They were shaded by fine large oaks; no underbrush nor weeds were suffered to grow about them, and altogether, they presented an appearance of neatness end comfort, as new and singular as it was pleasing. The servants' cabins, on all the plantations I had ever seen before, were a set of miserable ruinous hovels, with leaky roofs and clay floors, almost buried in a rank growth of weeds, and as dirty and ill-kept as they were uncomfortable.

The children, who were playing about the cabins, furnished a new occasion of surprise. I had been accustomed to see the children of a plantation, running about stark naked, or dressed — if dressed at all — in a shirt of dirty osnaburgs, hanging in tatters about their legs, and never washed after it was once put on. But the children at Oakland were neatly and comfortably clothed, and presented nothing of that squalid, pinched, neglected and half-starved appearance, to which my eye was so well accustomed. Their merry faces, and boisterous sports, called up no idea of juvenile wretchedness. I observed too, that the hands, who were just coming in from their work, were all well clothed. I saw none of those patched, tattered, ragged and filthy garments so common on other plantations.