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Chapter 2 OUR ESTABLISHMENT AT VAUCLUSE now consisted of the dear and beneficent lady, its head, and her two widowed daughters with their children (six of the latter, off and on), together with an endless procession, coming and going, of aunts and cousins, who stayed as long as they found it convenient and agreeable. Now, the “connection,” as it was called, embraced a surprising number of people with the same blood in their veins, and habit had made it law that anyone included in this brotherhood should be sacrosanct and free of all the house could offer as entailed upon hospitality . So the old white stucco dwelling, with its wings to right and left under the great oak trees of its lawns, went on stretching to receive guests, the stable took in their horses, the servants’ building, a little way from the pantry wing, received their attendants, and nobody ventured to think anybody was ever inconvenienced! The two daughters of the house, my mother, and my aunt, Mrs. Hyde, took care between them of the housekeeping. Our servants were hired black people, good and faithful souls, but, thank Heaven! not slaves of ours. My grandfather Fairfax1 had been the first gentleman in Virginia to manumit his slaves, had each of them taught a trade, and the efficient ones sent to Liberia at his expense. The latter part of his humanitarian scheme was, needless to say, not a success, most of them writing imploring letters to “old marse” to take them back again. There was no farm attached to the place, only gardens, a chicken-yard, orchard, and dairy, from which the table was supplied with country dainties . In the rooms were assembled the flotsam of family furnishings accumulated from other homes in England and Virginia, Towlston, Belvoir, and Ashgrove.2 We had on the walls a few interesting old Fairfax portraits: a “Percy, Earl of Northumberland,” a “Parliamentary General,” a Lady Fairfax with a busk,3 carrying a long feather in her hand, Roundheads and Cavaliers; and in the secretary many old parchments and a pedigree Refugitta of Richmond 18 illuminated in Elizabethan days, with a land transfer of the date of Richard Cœur de Lion. The drawing-room was large and bright, with many windows , all furnished and curtained in crimson damask. A large open grate held in winter a fire of logs and lumps of coal making a royal blaze; upon the mantle were girandoles4 and ostrich eggs, with some Dresden cups and saucers beautifully painted with wreaths of blossoms. In an alcove to one side were shelves of books, mostly old English volumes, saffron-hued and musty, that when opened were apt to send little queer bloodless insects scuttling out of them. There I sat (oftenest upon my foot) poring over the world of joy I got from this fragment of a library. When not thus employed, I was out-of-doors, scouring the woods, climbing trees, riding horses to water, wading streams, and picking wild flowers. Except for my cousin, Meta Hyde, younger than I, a big-eyed quaint creature whom her brothers teased and petted alternately, I was the only girl child at Vaucluse. Of the young men and boy cousins, passing in and out of the house, Vaucluse sent fourteen or fifteen to the war. They always seemed to me to illustrate what Colonel Lambert told Harry Warrington about the Persians, “They can ride and speak the truth.”5 The wonder is I was not spoiled utterly by their setting me on a pinnacle and doing all I asked, big or little, in or out of season. It was then decided by my mother that I could no longer roam and ride, or go shooting with the boys; so, after a long foreign correspondence, a French governess, Mademoiselle Adami, appeared upon the scene and was instructed to keep with me always in my walks abroad. Poor lady! It must be owned that she had her hands full, that I writhed under her mincing conventionalities of social doctrine, and that the boys played many a welcome trick on her, including the offering of persimmons from a tree in the pasture upon which frost had not yet laid its redeeming spell. But she knew how to teach, and in school-hours I was interested, and learned to like reading in French, which I have kept up unremittingly all my life since. Washington, our chief shopping-place, eight miles distant, was usually attained from Vaucluse in...

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