BY THOMAS NELSON PAGE With Illustrations by THE MISSES COWLES NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS M DCCC XCVIII Copyright, 1897 , By Charles Scribner’s Sons . University Press: John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A....

Which none need read unless he pleases. No one can be more fully aware of the shortcomings of this brief sketch of Social Life in the South before the War than is the writer. Its slightness might readily have excused it from republication. And yet it has seemed well to let it go forth on its own account, to take such place as it may in the great world of books. One reason is the partiality of a few friends who have desired to see it in this form. Another is the absolute ignorance of the outside

Let me see if I can describe an old Virginia home recalled from a memory stamped with it when a virgin page. It may, perhaps, be idealized by the haze of time; but it will be as I now remember it. The mansion was a plain “weather-board” house, one story and a half above the half-basement ground floor, set on a hill in a grove of primeval oaks and hickories filled in with ash, maples, and feathery-leafed locusts without number. It was built of timber cut by the “servants” (they were never termed