I am sure you forgive us, and hope you will prove it by asking us again.
"Your affectionate cousin,
"Judith Rives."
There was an ominous pause—and then the old dame said, in her sternest magisterial manner:—
"Tell Judy Rives to read Byron less—and Lord Chesterfield more." Turning to my aunt after the dignified old servitor had bowed himself out, she said, with fine scorn: "There's no use in telling her to read Dr. Samuel Johnson! 'Désolée,' forsooth!—and 'the foot of time'! That sounds like that idiot, Tom Moore."
I had a very good time at Cousin Betsey's. I helped to pick the berries and gather the eggs from the nests in the privet hedge. Also for several days I had a steady diet of "Fuller's pies."
As to the novel, if it appeared at all it fell upon the public ear with a dull thud. Still, Cousin Betsey must have been, in her way, a great woman, for it was of her that Thomas Jefferson exclaimed, "God send she were a man, that I might make her Professor in my University."
CHAPTER V
Something akin to the tulip mania of Holland possessed the Southern country in the early thirties. The Morus multicaulis, upon the leaves of which the silkworm feeds, can be propagated from slips or cuttings. These cuttings commanded a fabulous price. To plant them was to lay a sure foundation for a great fortune.
My uncle visited Richmond at a time when the mania had reached fever-heat. Men hurried through the streets, with bundles of twigs under their arms, as if they were flying from an enemy. All over the city auction sales were held, and fortunes lost or gained—as they are to-day in Wall Street—with the fluctuations of the market. "I saw old Jerry White running with a bundle of sticks under his arm as if the devil were after him," said my uncle,—lazy, rheumatic old Jerry, who had not for years left his chimney corner in winter, or the bench upon which he basked like a lizard in summer, except to eat and sleep!
Long galleries, roofed with glass, were hastily erected all over the country, the last year's eggs of the Bombyx mori obtained at great price, and the freshly gathered leaves of the Morus multicaulis laid in readiness for their hatching.