ent attentions in
comforting disconsolate wives during the absence of their husbands--and
this made him to be very much regarded by the honest burghers of the
city."_]

Moreover, there was now entering into Virginia conditions a sort of
feudality, less in theory than in fact. There was much to recall the
life of the old feudal baron. There was the same dependence upon the
household for the necessaries and many of the luxuries of life; in the
families of the great planters, such as Colonel Byrd of Westover,
--whose daughter, Evelyn Byrd, was the pearl of Virginia ladies in her
day, but died of a broken heart before she had grown past her first
maturity,--there was manufacture of the raw materials into the finished
product, under the eye of the mistress of the house. Slavery had by this
time become an established feature of Virginia society, and it was at
its best in results. The slaves answered in conditions to the feudal
servitors; they were retainers in a way, and they were also the workmen
of the home. They made shoes and rough clothing, and they performed all
the household tasks which were not strictly within the province of the
chatelaine. The field hands raised tobacco; and it was with this
commodity that the planter bought the silks and laces which clothed his
wife and daughters when they appeared _en grande tenue_. But, though
thus the lady of the manor had her duties in the training of her
household servants, in the supervision of the household tasks, and in
the provision of certain cates and other dainties which were to be made
by no hands but hers, her general duty, that which occupied more of her
time and thought than any other, was to be effective and satisfactory as
a hostess.

It was thus in the southern colonies, with their greater wealth in
servants and money and their consequently greater refinement, that there
first appeared the type of American woman as she was a little later to
be known throughout the land; but the coming of refinement and its
accompaniment, modishness, was not long confined to the Virginias.
Before the ending of the later colonial period and the beginnings of the
days of the Revolution, there were to be found refinement and modishness
in Massachusetts as in Virginia; but it was long before an equal amount
of luxury was there displayed. In the North the same distinction of
station was maintained between the "governor's lady" and the plebeian
housewife that existed in the South betw