Sketches from old Virginia

Front matter

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Preface

Several of the enclosed studies have appeared in whole, or part, in MacmillarCs Magazine at various times.

The following, however, were published in other periodicals, namely " The Doctor," " Mar'se Dab," and " Plantation Memories " in Blackwood. An " Old Virginian Foxhunter " and " Quail Shooting " in the Badminton Magazine ; and " On the Old Bethel Pike " in the Fortnightly Review^ under a slightly difiFerent title.

I have to thank Messrs. Blackwood, Messrs. Longman, and Messrs. Chapman and Hall for their courtesy in allowing me to include the above papers in this book.

The fact of this latter being a collection of studies written, for the most part, independently of one another, and at various times, will, I trust, sufficiently account for an absence of method or continuity that is under such circumstances inevitable.

So far as they go, however, they recall, I think, many of the characteristics of a generation that is rapidly

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passing away, and has at any rate long ceased to represent modern Virginia.

They relate chiefly to the period covered by the fifteen years or so following the war, when the whole adult population had been brought up under the institution of slavery, both white and black, while the former almost to a man had actually taken part, as individuals, in the great struggle that terminated it.

The Civil War, with its far-reaching consequences, succeeded in utterly dislocating the rural economy of the South, but it could not change the personalities, the habits, the traditions, and methods of thought of the men who had grown up under the system it destroyed.

I offer, therefore, no apology for the comparative remoteness for the most part, of my period. Indeed, this appears to me to furnish a perhaps somewhat needed excuse for the republication of these slight illustrations of it.

For what neither war nor legislation could accomplish of a sudden, time with its slower and surer hand has effectually done. Another generation, who have no personal knowledge of the slavery and ante-bellum period, has arisen. Its members have had to adapt themselves to the ways of life followed by other democratic communities engrossed in trade and agriculture. Virginia, in short, no longer possesses any particular social features that would make it of special interest to an outsider ; to one from Europe at any rate. Its material progress has happily been considerable, though not so great as some of its Sister States further South or that its friends and

PREFACE ix

well-wishers had perhaps hoped for having regard to its central position and former predominance. But this is a matter wholly alien to the point of view from which these Sketches were written. So I do not think I need offer any excuse for having allowed, what seemed to me during a residence of a great many years in the Old Dominion, and several subsequent visits, the more picturesque, humorous, and pathetic side of its life to find expression in the studies here collected.

One word in regard to the dialect passages. I have purposely avoided any elaboration in spelling the vernacular, whether of negro or "poor white" where such occurs, but have endeavoured to give the general sound and sense of this without taxing the application of readers who, as a body, are showing, I am told, unmistakable signs of revolt at being referred to appended glossaries even by distinguished and popular authors.

A. G. B.

Contents

PAGE

INTRODUCTION I

PARKIN THE SADDLER Ill ^

TWO EPISODES ON RUMBLING CREEK 212 X

A TURKEY HUNTER 265 V i