Dick returned to the camp before this letter was finished, and his master delivered it into his hands with an injunction to carry it to Branton in the early morning of the next day. He knew the habit of young women in Virginia, which was to receive and answer all letters carried by the hands of special messengers, before the nine o’clock breakfast hour. And there were far more of such letters interchanged than of those that came and went by the post. For the post, in those years, was not equipped with free delivery devices. Most of the plantations were nearer to each other than to the nearest postoffice, and there were young negroes in plenty to carry the multitudinous missives with which the highly cultured young women of the time and country maintained what was in effect a continuous conversation with each other. They wrote to each other upon every conceivable occasion, and often upon no occasion at all, but merely because the morning was fine and each wanted to call the other’s attention to the fact. If one read a novel that pleased her, she would send it with a note,--usually covering two sheets and heavily crossed,--to some friend whom she desired to share her enjoyment of it. Or if she had found a poem to her liking in Blackwood, or some other of the English magazines, for American periodicals circulated scarcely at all in Virginia in those days--except the Southern Literary Messenger, for which everybody subscribed as a matter of patriotic duty--she would rise “soon” in the morning, make half a dozen manuscript copies of it, and send them by the hands of little darkeys to her half dozen bosom friends, accompanying each with an astonishingly long “note.” I speak with authority here. I have seen Virginia girls in the act of doing this sort of thing, and I have read many hundreds of their literary criticisms. What a pity it is that they are lost to us! For some of them were mightily shrewd both in condemnation and in ecstatic approval, and all of them had the charm of perfect and fearless honesty in utterance, and all of them were founded upon an actual and attentive reading of the works criticised, as printed criticism usually is not. XXI HOW A HIGH BRED DAMSEL CONFRONTED FATE AND DUTY