"What is the matter?" we asked.
"I am laughing," he replied, "at the absurd questions these people can ask. What do you think? A man asked me just now if we didn't keep bloodhounds in Virginia to chase negroes! I told him: Oh, yes, every plantation keeps several dozen! And we often have a tender boiled negro infant for breakfast!"
"Oh, how could you have told such a story?" we said.
"Well," said he, "you know we never saw a bloodhound in Virginia, and I do not expect there is one in the State; but these people delight in believing everything horrible about us, and I thought I might as well gratify them with something marvelous. So the next book published up here will have, I've no doubt, a chapter headed: 'Bloodhounds in Virginia and boiled negroes for breakfast!'"
While we were purchasing some trifles to bring home to some of our servants, a lady who had entertained us most kindly at her house on Fifth Avenue, expressing surprise, said: "We never think of bringing home presents to our help."
This was the first time we had ever heard, instead of "servant," the word "help," which seemed then, and still seems, misapplied. The dictionaries define "help" to mean aid, assistance, remedy, while "servant" means one who attends another and acts at his command. When a man pays another to "help" him, it implies he is to do part of the work himself, and is dishonest if he leaves the whole to be performed by his "help."
Among other discoveries during this visit we found how much more talent it requires to entertain company in the country than in the city. In the latter the guests and family form no "social circle round the blazing hearth" at night, but disperse far and wide, to be entertained at the concert, the opera, the theatre, or club; while in the country one depends entirely upon native intellect and conversational talent.
And, oh! the memory of our own fireside circles! The exquisite women, the men of giant intellect, eloquence, and wit, at sundry times assembled there! Could our andirons but utter speech, what would they not tell of mirth and song, eloquence and wit, whose flow made many an evening bright!
As all delights must have an end, the time came for us to leave these metropolitan scenes, and, bidding adieu forever to the land of "modern appliances" and stale bread, we returned to the land of "old ham and corn cakes," and were soon surrounded by friends who came to hear the marvels we had to relate.