[“The little girls in their great sun-bonnets.”]
There were [the little girls in their great sunbonnets], often sewed on to preserve the wonderful peach-blossom complexions, with their small female companions playing about the yard or garden, running with and wishing they were boys, and getting half scoldings from mammy for being tomboys and tearing their aprons and dresses. There, in the shade, near her “house,” was the [mammy] with her assistants, her little charge in her arms, sleeping in her ample lap, or toddling about her, with broken, half-formed phrases, better understood than framed. There passed young negro girls, blue-habited, running about bearing messages; or older women moving at a statelier pace, doing with deliberation the little tasks which were their “work;” whilst about the office or smoke-house or dairy or wood-pile there was always some movement and life. The peace of it all was only emphasized by the sounds that broke upon it: the call of ploughers to their teams; the shrill shouts of children; the chant of women over their work, and as a bass the recurrent hum of spinning-wheels, like the drone of some great insect, sounding from cabins where the turbaned spinners spun their fleecy rolls for the looms which were clacking in the loom-rooms making homespun for the plantation.
[“Busy over their little matters with that ceaseless energy of boyhood.”]
From the back yard and quarters the laughter of women and the shrill, joyous voices of children came. Far off, in the fields, the white-shirted “ploughers” followed singing their slow teams in the fresh furrows, wagons rattled, and ox-carts crawled along, or gangs of hands in lines performed their work in the corn or tobacco fields, loud shouts and peals of laughter, mellowed by the distance, floating up from time to time, telling that the heart was light and the toil not too heavy.
