set themselves
systematically about the performance of the duty. The work was done
deftly and discreetly, out of the sight and hearing of our elders. Young
and raw as I was, I was too wise to tell tales on them. By the time I
was four years old that lesson was rubbed into my consciousness by the
gruesome rhyme:--

"Tell-tale tit!
Your tongue shall be slit,
And every dog in our town
Shall have a little bit!"

This apparently tedious preamble yet leads by an air-line to the first
Agricultural Fair ever held at Powhatan Court House. The date was
October fifteenth, and all the gentlemen and ladies in the county were
entreated to send exhibits of plantation products and feminine
handiwork. Enthusiasm ran from homestead to homestead with the speed and
heat of a March fire in pine woods. Cattle, tobacco, grain, vegetables,
fruit, flowers, bedquilts, poultry, bees, knitting,
embroideries,--nothing was talked of but the finest specimens of these
that would be "in strong and beauteous order ranged," upon the important
day.

Madeline Pemberton had "done" a chair-cover in cross-stitch that her
mother said ought to get the first prize, and was dead sure to take the
third; Mary 'Liza was knitting a pair of shell-pattern, openwork
stockings as fine as a cobweb, in which there would not be a knot or a
dropped stitch, and Paulina Hobson was putting her eyes out over a
linen-cambric handkerchief under Miss Davidson's direction. Fine sewing
and embroidery were taught by governesses then. Sarah Hobson had pieced
a crib quilt containing one thousand and twelve tiny squares. I was
supposed to be left out in the cold. I would not knit, and to sew I was
ashamed because I did it so badly. Nobody paid any attention to me when
comparing notes and queries touching the great show.

Yet I nursed an ambition of my own to which no one was privy except
Spotswoode, a gray-headed, and proverbially taciturn field-hand, without
whose knowledge and cooperation the purpose could not have been carried
out.

Wandering, one July afternoon, on the outskirts of a corn-field--the
same in which I once lost Musidora--I happened upon a "volunteer"
mangel-wurzel beet that had sprung up in a fence corner, a quarter of a
mile away from any of its kindred. Attracted by the beauty of the
translucent, red-veined leaves, I called to Spotswoode who was ploughing
between the corn rows, and asked him what it was. Adopting the waif,
then and there, I dug wh