The new home held a large family. The stately old dame who had settled us for life, occupied a sunny front chamber, and in addition to our household proper, we had had with us, for two years, my mother’s widowed brother-in-law, “Uncle” Cams, and the stepdaughter for whose sake we had consented to receive him. My aunt had died soon after her youngest child (Anne) was taken to a Better Country; Cousin Paulina went a year later, and as the mother’s parting request to the eldest of her flock was that she would “take care of her father,” separation was not to be thought of. None of us loved the lonely old man. One and all, we loved her who was a younger sister to our mother, and a second mother to her children. So we sat down to our meals every day, a full dozen, all told, and as we were seldom without a visitor, we must have been “thirteen at table”, times without number. If we had ever heard the absurd superstition that would have forbidden it, we never gave it a thought. I should not have liked to meet my father’s frown and hear his comment, had the matter been broached in his hearing. The modern (nominal) mistress would be horrified at the thought of twelve eaters, drinkers, and sleepers under the roof of a private house. We descried nothing out of the way in it, and fared exceeding comfortably from year’s end to year’s end. Large families were still respectable in the public eye, and an increase in the number of domestics kept the addition to the white family from bearing hard upon the housemother. How gayly and smoothly the little craft of my life moved on up to the middle of ’53, let a few passages from a letter dated July 23d of that year, testify: “I came back from the mountains on the 2d of this month. I had a charming visit at Piedmont. I believe I left warm friends behind me when I reluctantly said ‘Good-bye’ to the hospitable abode. I was the only young lady on the plantation, and there were four grown brothers and a cousin or two. Each had his pet riding-horse, which he ‘must have me try.’ I had rides, morning and evening, and once at _high noon_. In June! Think of it! I won’t tell you which Rosinante I preferred. You might have a notion that his master shared his honors, and these shrewd guesses are inconvenient sometimes. The very considerate gallants found out, ‘by the merest chance,’ that it made me sick to ride in a closed carriage, and, of course, as there were two buggies on the place, there was ‘tall’ bidding as to which I should distinguish by accepting a seat in it. Sarah C., her mother, and sister were kindness itself to me. I was quite ashamed of my unworthiness of such petting.... “I got home just in time to help Mea with the preparations for her Northern trip, and to get ready for Sarah Ragland’s wedding—an event that had its influence in shaping my summer plans.