ed, my hands kissed,
my very feet embraced, and nothing less than a very--I can't say fair, but
full--buss of my lips would satisfy the old man weeping and sobbing in my
face.... They ... held my hands, hung upon me; I could scarce get from
them. 'Ah,' said the old man, 'I never thought to see you again; now I am
happy; Ah, I never thought to see you again.'"[14]

[Footnote 13: Emily J. Putnam, _The Lady_ (New York, 1910), pp. 282-323.]

[Footnote 14: D.D. Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_, p. 436.]

Among the clearest views of plantation life extant are those of two
Northern tutors who wrote of their Southern sojourns. One was Philip
Fithian who went from Princeton in 1773 to teach the children of Colonel
Robert Carter of Nomoni Hall in the "Northern Neck" of Virginia, probably
the most aristocratic community of the whole South: the other was A. de Puy
Van Buren who left Battle Creek in the eighteen-fifties to seek health and
employment in Mississippi and found them both, and happiness too, amid the
freshly settled folk on the banks of the Yazoo River. Each of these made
jottings now and then of the work and play of the negroes, but both of them
were mainly impressed by the social regime in which they found themselves
among the whites. Fithian marveled at the evidences of wealth and the
stratification of society, but he reckoned that a well recommended
Princeton graduate, with no questions asked as to his family, fortune or
business, would be rated socially as on an equal footing with the owner
of a L10,000 estate, though this might be discounted one-half if he were
unfashionably ignorant of dancing, boxing, fencing, fiddling and cards.[15]
He was attracted by the buoyancy, the good breeding and the cordiality of
those whom he met, and particularly by the sound qualities of Colonel and
Mrs. Carter with whom he dwelt; but as a budding Presbyterian preacher he
was a little shocked at first by the easy-going conduct of the Episcopalian
planters on Sundays. The time at church, he wrote, falls into three
divisions: first, that before service, which is filled by the giving and
receiving of business letters, the reading of advertisements and the
discussion of crop prices and the lineage and qualities of favorite horses;
second, "in the church at service, prayrs read over in haste, a sermon
seldom under and never over twenty minutes, but always made up of sound
morality or deep, studied metaphysicks;"[16] third, "after service