Besides the householders, with their sons and daughters, who regularly exchanged visits with each other at least once or twice annually, Virginia had also her class of impecunious bachelors, whose practice was to visit from house to house, taking in all the well-to-do families. Until the Revolution—when they had something else to do—they represented the class of hangers-on to wealth, known to-day as "the little brothers of the rich,"—very nice, adaptable, agreeable gentlemen, whom everybody likes, and to whom society is willing to give much, exacting little in return. In pre-Revolutionary Virginia, however, they could and did give something. They gathered the news from house to house, brought letters and the northern papers; were intelligent couriers, in short, who kept the planter well-advised of all political rumors. They possessed certain social accomplishments, could carve fairy baskets out of cherry stones, cut profile portraits to be laid on a black background, and make and mend pens to perfection. "When I was in Stafford County a month ago," says the tutor at "Nomini Hall," "I met[7] Captain John Lee, a Gentleman who seems to copy the character of Addison's Will Wimble. He was then just sallying out on his Winter's Visits, and has got now so far as here; he stays, as I am told, about eight or ten weeks in the yeare at his own House, the remaining part he lives with his Waiting Man on his Friends." Captain Lee, by the way, is further recorded as "a distant cousin of the Lees of Westmoreland."
In making these visits to the large country houses, young people would naturally confer together and manage to meet those they knew best and liked best. Thus it would sometimes happen (and who so willing as the hosts?) that a large house-party would assemble unheralded, and the house be filled with a merry company. "The usual retinue," says General Maury, "at my wife's home was fifteen or more well-trained servants when the house was full of company; and as many as thirty or more of the family and friends daily dined there together for weeks and months at a time." This was at Cleveland, near Fredericksburg; and hospitality quite as generous ruled all the homes in Mary Washington's neighborhood.
It sometimes happened that the capacity of the elastic house reached its limit. On one such rare occasion a belated Presbyterian minister alighted at the front gate and walked in with his baggage,—a pair of well-worn saddle-bags. He was warmly welcomed, of course, but the lady of the manor was in despair. Where could he sleep? Every corner was full. One couldn't ask a clergyman to spend the night on a settee in the passageway, nor lie upon a "pallet" of quilts on the parlor floor. The children heard the troubled consultation as to ways and means with their "Mammy," and were full of sympathy for the homeless, unsheltered guest. The situation was still serious when the household was summoned to family prayers. The clergyman—a gaunt specimen with a beaklike nose and mournful voice—launched into the one hundred and second Psalm, pouring out, as the pitying children thought, his own soul in its homeless desolation. When he reached the words, "I am like a pelican in the wilderness: I am like an owl in the desert: I am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop," the exultant voice of the youngest little girl rang out, "Mamma, he can roost on the tester!" One cannot wonder at this advice from a hospitable man who had been literally "eaten out of house and home," "I advise my son to keep out of other people's houses, and keep other people out of his own."
One can hardly imagine the care and labor involved in so much entertaining. Nobody ever passed a house without calling; nobody ever left it without refreshment for man and beast. Horses and servants attended every visitor.
The Kitchen of Mount Vernon.
Think of the quantity of food to be provided! And yet, a housewife's batterie de cuisine was of the simplest. The kitchen fireplace held the iron pot for boiling the indispensable and much-respected gammon of bacon (Virginia ham), and there were lidded ovens, large and small, standing high on four feet, that coals might burn brightly beneath them. There was a "skillet," with its ever ascending incense from frying chickens and batter-cakes,—a long-handled utensil with no feet at all, but resting upon the portable, triangular "trevet,"—which, being light, could be thrust into the very heart of the fire or drawn out on the fire-proof dirt floor. There was a "hoe," known as a cooking utensil only in Virginia, slanting before the coals for the thin hoe-cake of Indian meal. In front stood the glory and pride of the kitchen,—the spit, like two tall andirons with deeply serrated sides, on which iron rods holding flesh and fowl could rest and be turned to roast equally. An ample pan beneath caught the basting-butter and juices of the meat. This spit held an exposed position, and has been known to be robbed now and then by some unmannerly hound, or wandering Caleb Balderstone, unable to resist such temptations. What would the modern queen of the kitchen think of "a situation" involving such trials,—her own wood often to be brought by herself, her breakfast, including four or five kinds of bread (waffles, biscuit thick and thin, batter-cakes, loaf bread), her poultry to be killed and plucked by herself, her coffee to be roasted, fish scaled and cleaned, meats cut from a carcass and trimmed, to say nothing of cakes, puddings, and pies? And all this to be done for a perennial house-party, with its footmen and maids!
True, the negro cook of colonial times had many "kitchen-maids,"—her own children. But even with these her achievements were almost supernatural. With her half-dozen utensils she served a dinner that deserved—and has—immortality! "Old Phyllis," the cook at "Blenheim," "Mammy Lucy" at Cleveland, and many others have a high place in an old Virginian's Hall of Fame,—his heart!