If madame’s comforts in society were diminished, her domestic satisfactions were not less so. By the time I came to live with her, Mariamat and Dianamat were almost superannuated, and had lost, in a great measure, the restraining power they used to exercise over their respective offspring. Their woolly heads were snow white, and they were become so feeble, that they sat each in her great chair, at the opposite side of the fire; their wonted jealousy was now embittered to rancour, and their love of tobacco greater than ever. They were arrived at that happy period of ease and indolence, which left them at full liberty to smoke and scold the whole day long; this they did with such unwearied perseverance, and in a manner so ludicrous, that to us young people they were a perpetual comedy. Sorely now did aunt lament the promise she had kept so faithfully, never to sell any of the Colonel’s negroes. There was so little to do for fourteen persons, except the business they created for each other, and it was so impossible to keep them from too freely sharing the plenty of her liberal house, that idleness and abundance literally began to corrupt them. All these privations and uneasinesses will in some measure account for such a person as madame taking such pleasure in the society of an overgrown child. But then she was glad to escape from dark prospects and cross politics, to the amusement derived from the innocent cheerfulness natural to that time of life. A passion for reading, and a very comprehensive memory too, had furnished my mind with more variety of knowledge, than fell to the lot of those, who, living in large families, and sharing the amusements of childhood, were not, like me, driven to that only resource. All this will help to account for a degree of confidence and favour daily increasing, which ended in my being admitted to sleep in a little bed beside her, which never happened to any other. In the winter nights, our conversation often encroached on the earlier hours of morning. The future appeared to her dubious and cheerless, which was one reason, I suppose, that her active mind turned solely on retrospection. She saw that I listened with delighted attention to the tales of other times, which no one could recount so well. These, too, were doubly interesting, as, like the sociable angel’s conversation with our first father, they related to the origin and formation of all I saw around me; they afforded food for reflection, to which I was very early addicted, and hourly increased my veneration for her whom I already considered as my polar star. The great love I had for her first gave interest to her details; and again, the nature of these details increased my esteem for the narrator. Thus passed this winter of felicity, which so much enlarged my stock of ideas, that in looking back upon it, I thought I had lived three years in one. ------- CHAP. LV.