the care of a venerable, white-haired old woman, bent half double with age, whom they called "Granny;" and a merry sight of it they were, from infants of three or four months, in the arms of little nurses just big enough to carry them, to children of twelve or fourteen, all cleanly dressed, — a thing I had never seen before on a plantation, — the larger ones having the range of an ample play-ground about the nominal school-house, where they amused themselves with sports and monkey tricks innumerable. The only thing that Granny undertook to teach was good manners, upon which subject her lectures, at least during the presence of visitors, were very incessant and sufficiently amusing. The title of "Granny" was not in her case merely nominal, so Mr Mason told me. She was, in fact, grandmother, or great-grandmother, or great-great-grandmother of nearly every one of the children about her. Mr Mason himself addressed her by the title of aunt Dolly, with almost as much kindness and affection as if she had been his own grandmother — treatment on his part to which he said she was well entitled, as being in fact the founder and source of the fortunes of the family. His father's first earnings had been invested, some fifty years before, in the purchase of aunt Dolly, then a young woman with three or four children. She afterwards had others, twelve in all, and all females. The daughters had been scarcely less fruitful than the mother; and it was from this source that the whole plantation, as well as that at Poplar Grove, had been stocked. In fact, his father, who was a man of some scruples, had never sold a servant in his life, and never bought one except Aunt Dolly, at her own special request, and a number of likely men as husbands for his superabundant females.
The system of management upon Mr Mason's plantation, inherited, as he told me, in part from his father, but improved by himself, I found to be totally different from any thing I had ever seen elsewhere, except that it reminded me, in several points, of the
