The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky, and Other Kentucky Articles. Allen James Lane

an entire family of acquaintances arriving unannounced, with trunks and servants of their own, for a visit protracted in accordance with the large hospitalities of the time. What wonder if, from sheer inability to do all things herself, she trains her negroes to different posts of honor, so that the black cook finally expels her from her own kitchen and rules over that realm as an autocrat of unquestioned prerogatives?

      Mistresses of this kind had material reward in the trusty adherence of their servants during the war. Their relations throughout this period – so well calculated to try the loyalty of the African nature – would of themselves make up a volume of the most touching incidents. Even to-day one will find in many Kentucky households survivals of the old order – find "Aunt Chloe" ruling as a despot in the kitchen, and making her will the pivotal point of the whole domestic system. I have spent nights with a young Kentuckian, self-willed and high-spirited, whose occasional refusals to rise for a half-past five o'clock breakfast always brought the cook from the kitchen up to his bedroom, where she delivered her commands in a voice worthy of Catherine the Great. "We shall have to get up," he would say, "or there'll be a row!" One may yet see old negresses setting out for an annual or a semi-annual visit to their former mistresses, and bearing some offering – a basket of fruits or flowers. I should like to mention the case of one who died after the war and left her two children to her mistress, to be reared and educated. The troublesome, expensive charge was faithfully executed.

      Here, in the hard realities of daily life, here is where the crushing burden of slavery fell – on the women of the South. History has yet to do justice to the noblest type of them, whether in Kentucky or elsewhere. In view of what they accomplished, despite the difficulties in their way, there is nothing they have found harder to forgive in the women of the North than the failure to sympathize with them in the struggles and sorrows of their lot, and to realize that they were the real practical philanthropists of the negro race.