The training of her children was her work. She watched over them, inspired them, led them, governed them; her will impelled them; her word to them, as to her servants, was law. She reaped the reward. If she admired them, she was too wise to let them know it; but her sympathy and tenderness were theirs always, and they worshipped her.
There was something in seeing the master and mistress obeyed by the plantation and looked up to by the neighborhood which inspired the children with a reverence akin to awe which is not known at this present time. It was not till the young people were grown that this reverence lost the awe and became based only upon affection and admiration. Then, for the first time, they dared to jest with her; then, for the first time, they took in that she had been like them once, young and gay and pleasure-loving, with coquetries and maidenly ways, with lovers suing for her; and that she still took pleasure in the recollection,--this gentle, classic, serious mother among her tall sons and radiant daughters. How she blushed as they laughed at her and teased her to tell of her conquests, her confusion making her look younger and prettier than they remembered her, and opening their eyes to the truth of what their father had told them so often, that not one of them could be as beautiful as she.
She became timid and dependent as they grew up and she found them adorned with new fashions and ways which she did not know; she gave herself up to their guidance with an appealing kind of diffidence; was tremulous over her ignorance of the novel fashions which made them so charming. Yet, when the exactions of her position came upon her, she calmly took the lead, and, by her instinctive dignity, her wisdom, and her force, eclipsed them all as naturally as the full moon in heaven dims the stars.