Judge Mason's tobacco-bag was the next subject of my inquiry.
"'Tisn't cloth-cloth. Is it tobacco-cloth?" I asked. "Did people have tobacco-cloth as well as tobacco-money in those days?"
"No; this is rattlesnake skin. The snake was killed by Charles Lewis, who lived a long time ago in my county, Augusta. The Indians caught him, tied his hands behind him and made him walk two hundred miles. As they were going along a high precipice he broke the cords and jumped down. The Indians followed and he escaped by springing over a fallen tree, landing among the tall weeds. His pursuers did not see him fall and they jumped over both the tree and the man and ran on as fast as they could. Lying there he heard the hissing of a snake and opening his eyes saw a large rattlesnake almost touching him. It moved its rattles and twice they rested upon his ear and neck. He was so numbed with fright that he could not move, luckily for him, for if he had moved a muscle or breathed the snake would have bitten him. Its eyes glared into his and it seemed to think he was dead, and so wriggled away. He picked up a stone and hit it upon the head, killing it, and carried home the rattles and skin and this bag was made from a piece of that skin."
The mother of this Charles Lewis was the beautiful daughter of the Laird of Loch Lyn, and to his father, John Lewis, was accredited the introduction of red clover. The white or wild clover was of indigenous growth and abounded in great plenty, but the red clover was not known until the blood of the red man, shed by the Lewises and their followers, suddenly dyed the trefoil to its sanguinary hue. The Indians fully believed this legend and superstitiously held the red clover sacred. The superstition spread among the settlers and for a long time the milk of a cow that had eaten the blood-stained blossom was believed to be tainted with blood.
Little Ned Drewry, the third occupant of the gig, with a boy's natural indifference to poetic effusion, had slipped away during my "twinkle little star" and was playing "paterroller" with the colored children and the bloodhounds, and my elders began to talk of the man for whom he was named, a victim of the Nat Turner insurrection. I was not usually permitted to hear such gruesome stories, but if they thought of me at all they must have supposed that I was too young to understand or too sleepy to notice. So they told some of the painful incidents connected with the startling episode of 1832, while I leaned back in my chair and drooped my little head. Judge Mason's sister, Mrs. Boykin, my grandmother's friend at Old Point Comfort, had come near being killed in the insurrection. She was saved by her maid, who hid her in a woodpile till the danger was over.
Thus the simple-hearted, modest, unassuming old man sat with his long fig-stem Powhatan clay pipe in his mouth, smoking and talking and making history for a little child who never forgot the stories he told. Judge Mason was given all the honors of his State—ten years a Member of the Virginia Assembly, six years her Representative in Congress, a Judge of the United States Court for Virginia, Secretary of the Navy under President Tyler, Attorney-General and Secretary of the Navy under President Polk, Minister to France in the Pierce administration, one of the three who drew up the Ostend Manifesto—all these he was to the world.
To me he has always remained the gentle-mannered man with sweet face and soft voice who told the old-time stories in my plantation home while all, from the master to the humblest servant and the smallest child, listened with eager attention and delighted hearts. Two years before the opening of the war between the States my grandmother's heart was saddened by the news from Paris of the death of this old friend.