Besides the householders, with their sons and daughters, who regularly exchanged visits with each other at least once or twice annually, Virginia had also her class of impecunious bachelors, whose practice was to visit from house to house, taking in all the well-to-do families. Until the Revolution--when they had something else to do--they represented the class of hangers-on to wealth, known to-day as "the little brothers of the rich,"--very nice, adaptable, agreeable gentlemen, whom everybody likes, and to whom society is willing to give much, exacting little in return. In pre-Revolutionary Virginia, however, they could and did give something. They gathered the news from house to house, brought letters and the northern papers; were intelligent couriers, in short, who kept the planter well-advised of all political rumors. They possessed certain social accomplishments, could carve fairy baskets out of cherry stones, cut profile portraits to be laid on a black background, and make and mend pens to perfection. "When I was in Stafford County a month ago," says the tutor at "Nomini Hall," "I met[7] Captain John Lee, a Gentleman who seems to copy the character of Addison's Will Wimble. He was then just sallying out on his Winter's Visits, and has got now so far as here; he stays, as I am told, about eight or ten weeks in the yeare at his own House, the remaining part he lives with his Waiting Man on his Friends." Captain Lee, by the way, is further recorded as "a _distant_ cousin of the Lees of Westmoreland." [7] Fithian's Diary. In making these visits to the large country houses, young people would naturally confer together and manage to meet those they knew best and liked best. Thus it would sometimes happen (and who so willing as the hosts?) that a large house-party would assemble unheralded, and the house be filled with a merry company. "The usual retinue," says General Maury, "at my wife's home was fifteen or more well-trained servants when the house was full of company; and as many as thirty or more of the family and friends daily dined there together for weeks and months at a time." This was at Cleveland, near Fredericksburg; and hospitality quite as generous ruled all the homes in Mary Washington's neighborhood.