CHAPTER I.
Early Years and Scenes.
The girlhood of Dorothy Payne was spent on a plantation in Hanover county, Virginia. Very quiet and uneventful were the years whose "days were full of happiness," the quiet happiness of country life. For fifteen years
"She dwelt beside the untrodden ways"
where the distant echoes of the busy world, or even the great Revolutionary struggles that encompassed them round about, scarce caused a ripple on the calm surface of their daily life.
She was born, however, in North Carolina, that happy region where "every one does what seems best in his own eyes," or, better still, enjoys, as did Colonel Byrd, "the Carolina felicity of having nothing to do!" A rough people many of them still were, without doubt, when the little Dolly was born in their midst, on a plantation in Guilford county, to take charge of which her father had come a few years before from his Virginia home to where a thrifty, God-fearing colony of Quaker emigrants from New Garden, Pennsylvania, had peopled the wilderness, and in memory of the Pennsylvania home had erected a new "New Garden Meeting House" in a forest clearing. Very commodious it looked in comparison with the log cabins from which its congregation gathered to "mid-week" and "First-day Meeting," coming usually in the covered emigrant wagon that was ofttimes their only means of conveyance, but which well suited the size of the emigrant family.
Friends' Meeting House, New Garden, North Carolina. From an old Drawing.
Turning over their earliest book of records, still distinct but yellowed by age, the curious visitor may find a page on which is inscribed the following:
John Payne was born ye 9 of ye 12 mo 1740.
Mary, his wife, was born ye 14 of ye 10 mo 1743.
Walter, their son, was born ye 15 of ye 11 mo 1762.