After this there are several letters from Governor Lucas, showing how earnestly he wished to have the raising of indigo a success, and he suggested that the brick vats may have been the cause of the failure, and advised trying wood, but the truth of the trouble lay in the fact that the two overseers sent by the Governor had been traitors, who purposely achieved poor results, so that the American product should not compete with that exported from their native island of Monserrat. When Eliza discovered this her father at once sent a negro from one of the French islands to replace them, and from that time the results were steadily satisfactory. Soon enough indigo was raised to make it worth while to export to England, and the English at once offered a bounty of sixpence a pound. It is said that as long as this was paid, the planters doubled their capital every three or four years, and in order to commemorate the source of their wealth they formed what was at first merely a social club, called the "Winyah Indigo Club," but later established the first free school in the province outside of Charles Town, a school which, handsomely endowed and supported, continued a useful existence down to 1865.
Indigo continued to be a chief staple of the country for more than thirty years, history tells us, and after the Revolution it was again cultivated, but the loss of the British bounty, the rivalry of the East Indies with their cheaper labour and the easier cultivation of cotton, all contributed to its abandonment about the end of the century. However, just before the Revolution, the annual export amounted to the enormous quantity of one million, one hundred and seven thousand, six hundred and sixty pounds, and all this revenue to the province of Carolina, and its added benefits to all classes of citizens, was the direct result of the perseverance and intelligence of Eliza Lucas, the girl planter of the eighteenth century. Let the girls of our day look to their laurels if they wish to be enrolled in the same class with this indomitable little maid of South Carolina!
LADY JANE GREY:
The Nine Days Queen
IN all England there was no more picturesquely beautiful estate than that at Bradgate in Leicestershire, belonging to Henry, Marquis of Dorset, the father of Lady Jane Grey. There Lady Jane was born in 1537, in the great brick house on a hill, called Bradgate Manor, which overlooked acres of rolling lawns, long stretches of woodland and extensive gardens, making a vast playground, and one which might well have contented a less resourceful person than Lady Jane.
As it was, she was utterly unlike her two sisters, Mary and Katherine, being a precocious child, fonder of books than of play, and doubtless was less rugged in after years than if she had romped through meadow and marsh as they did, or waded in the clear brook that babbled its way through the woodland depths of Bradgate forests. Instead, while the other girls ran races, or played some boisterous game of childhood, we have glimpses of demure little Jane, even then as pretty as a doll in her quaint dress, fashioned on the model of that worn by her own mother, either sitting quietly in the house, so absorbed in her book that friend or foe might have approached unnoticed, or on the velvety lawn surrounding the Manor House, intent on some dry treatise, far above the understanding of an ordinary child, looking up now and then to glance off at the wonderful view spread out below her—a view so extensive that it overlooked seven counties of England.
LADY JANE GREY