If the writers of the plays referred to would attend one of the formal assemblies under one of the old social associations in the South,—for instance, the St. Cecilia Ball in Charleston, one of the final refuges of old-fashioned gentility and distinguished manners,—they would get some idea of what old-time good breeding and high courtesy were.
It is perhaps partly to correct this erroneous idea of the Old South that this little essay has been attempted. But mainly it has been from sheer affection.
T. N. P.
SOCIAL LIFE IN OLD VIRGINIA
BEFORE THE WAR
Let me see if I can describe an old Virginia home recalled from a memory stamped with it when a virgin page. It may, perhaps, be idealized by the haze of time; but it will be as I now remember it.
The mansion was a plain “weather-board” house, one story and a half above the half-basement ground floor, set on a hill in a grove of primeval oaks and hickories filled in with ash, maples, and feathery-leafed locusts without number. It was built of timber cut by the “servants” (they were never termed slaves except in legal documents) out of the virgin forest, not long after the Revolution, when that branch of the family moved from Yorktown. It had quaint dormer windows, with small panes, poking out from its sloping upstairs rooms, and long porches to shelter its walls from the sun and allow house life in the open air.
A number of magnificent oaks and hickories (there had originally been a dozen of the former, and the place from them took its name, “Oakland”), under which Totapottamoi children may have played, spread their long arms about it, sheltering nearly a half-acre apiece; whilst in among them and all around were ash and maples, an evergreen or two, lilacs and syringas and roses, and locusts of every age and size, which in springtime filled the air with honeyed perfume, and lulled with the “murmur of innumerable bees.”