Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/135

108 From the time of her coming to Carolina, Eliza Lucas' letters tell the story of her life, and they portray a fullness and usefulness and activity remarkable in so young a girl; they also show a charming, unaffected personality, and are, moreover, a splendid reflection of the living, working and social conditions of the times. In the midst of the busy life she found time to cultivate her artistic tastes. She tells us that she devoted a certain time every day to the study of music, and we find her writing to ask her father's permission to send to England for "cantatas, Weldon's Anthems, and Knollyss' Rules for Tuning." Her fondness for literature, it seems, quite scandalized one old gentlewoman in the neighborhood, who took such a dislike to her books that, "She had liked to have thrown my Plutarch's Lives into the fire. She is sadly afraid," writes the amazed young lady, "that I might read myself mad." All through her letters we catch glimpses of grain fields, pleasant groves of oak and laurel, meadows mingling with young myrtle and yellow jasmine, while to the sweet melodies of the birds she listened and learned to identify each.

There is another sort of music quite different from that of the birds, mentioned now and then in her letters. It is the humming of the fiddles floating down to her through the maze of years in the solemn measures of the minuet, the gay strains of the reel and the merry country dances; for this industrious young daughter of the Colonial days could be frivolous when occasion demanded it and she could trip the dance as charmingly as any city belle. Her letters give vivid pictures of society in Charleston and the festivities at the country seats near her home.

When Miss Lucas went to a party she traveled in a post-chaise which her mother had imported from England, and her escort rode beside her on a "small, spirited horse of the Chickasaw breed." If she went by water she was carried down the