“I thank you, my dear. May the Lord bless you, and may He bless your dear babes—little Clarice and John.”
CHAPTER XXXII
AN EARTHLY PARADISE
Spring opens early on the southwestern section of Virginia, and leaves, flowers and birds come soon.
Palma and her babies were out with the violets and the bluebirds. And no one could have more enjoyed the beautiful weather in this glorious scene than the city-bred girl.
Even in April, the cup-shaped vale, shut in by green-wooded mountains, seemed a Garden of Eden, or the fairy “Valley of Calm Delights.”
Stuart had taken to agricultural life as to his native element, and often declared his delight in it, and expressed his wonder how he, the descendant of a hundred generations of farmers, could have been contented to live in a city.
Directly after breakfast every morning he mounted his horse and rode out afield to look after the laborers. Certainly, much of the theory and practice of farming he had to learn from his uncle; but he was an apt pupil. So apt, he said to Palma, that his learning seemed to him more like the recollection of forgotten knowledge than the acquisition of new ideas.
Palma, for her part, loved to put her two babies in the double perambulator that had been brought from the nearest town for their use, and, attended by Hatty, wheel them out to the road that ran around the vale and was dotted with the log huts and little gardens of the negroes on the side next to the mountain. This was like a royal progress. Everywhere the young mother and children were greeted with joy by the colored women and girls in the cabins.
On week days none but women and children could be found there; all the men were afield.
On Sunday they would all, or nearly all, go to church; and it was a strange thing that a little community, numbering less than one hundred, men, women and children all counted, should include so many religious sects; for here were to be found Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists and Baptists. I think that was all; for of finer sub-divisions of doctrine or opinion they knew nothing, and a more Christian community than the people of this plantation, notwithstanding their sectarian differences, could scarcely be found anywhere. And this was owing, in a great measure, to the teachings and example of their master—a pure Christian.