I had also heard from Ol' Peter that there had been a war between our country and another, named England, and that a great man named Washington had once stopped at this very house in which we lived. Ol' Peter described to me the surrender of Cornwallis (at which he had been present, according to accounts); but my mother's talk and all she read about was of France, that I gradually came to believe must have been the most beautiful country in the world. Yet my mother always spoke as if France were dead, which puzzled me not a little. Of a truth, there were many things that puzzled me in those days. I had so many times received the answer, "You will learn all some day--_On vous dira tout ça un de ces jours, mon petit_," that at last I learned to hold back my curiosity, or to answer with my own imagination. Our neighbors, who were not very neighborly, lived at long distances from us. They had no children, and up to my tenth year I had never exchanged a thought with any one of my own age. To tell the truth I am afraid my mother did not encourage the people near us to be very friendly, and I suppose that they talked much, and perhaps said spiteful things about her. I can remember how I began to notice that she seldom walked farther than the rose-bush at the end of the garden path, and that she was growing thinner and thinner, yet more beautiful every day. We led a very simple existence, living mostly on what we raised in the garden and what Ol' Peter brought back from the "cross-roads"--a collection of three houses five or six miles distant from our plantation. But I was growing big and strong for my age--so strong, indeed, that I could handle the heavy oars when Peter and I went out on the river to tend the nets; and never shall I forget the first time I was allowed to fire the old fowling-piece that occasionally brought a fat canvas-back duck, lusciously reeking of wild celery, to grace our table. The furnishings of the big house we lived in I can recall in detail; they were very rich, although there were no carpets in any of the rooms except in the room my mother slept in. But there were great nail-studded chairs, and two carved oak sideboards, and a wonderful clock, upon which, by-the-way, I took my first lesson in geography; it was shaped like a golden earth, with the hours marked upon its circumference, and a hand that pointed them out as each came around in turn.