hown in a vast and unbounded hospitality, a hospitality so insatiable
that it watched for and waylaid travellers to expend a welcome and
lavish attentions upon. Negroes were stationed at the planter's gate
where it opened on the post-road or turnpike, to hail travellers and
assure them of a hearty welcome at the "big house up yonder." One writer
says of the planters:--

"Their manner of living is most generous and open: strangers are
sought after with Greediness to be invited."

The _London Magazine_ of the year 1743 published a series of papers
entitled _Itinerant Observations in America_. It was written with a
spirited pen which thus pleasantly describes simple Maryland
hospitality, not of men of vast wealth but of very poor folk:--

"With the meaner Sort you find little else to drink but Water
amongst them when their Cyder is spent, but the Water is presented
you by one of the barefooted Family in a copious Calabash, with an
innocent Strain of good Breeding and Heartiness, the Cake baking on
the Hearth, and the prodigious Cleanliness of everything around you
must needs put you in Mind of the Golden Age, the Times of ancient
Frugality and Purity. All over the Colony a universal Hospitality
reigns, full Tables and open Doors; the kind Salute, the generous
Detention speak somewhat like the roast-Beef Ages of our
Forefathers."

There came a time when this Southern hospitality became burdensome. With
the exhaustion of the soil and competition in tobacco-raising, the great
wealth of the Virginians was gone. But visitors did not cease; in fact,
they increased. The generous welcome offered to kinsmen, friends, and
occasional travellers was sought by curiosity-hunters and tourists who
wanted to save a tavern-bill. Nothing could be more pathetic than the
impoverishment of Thomas Jefferson through these impositions. Times and
conditions had changed, but Jefferson felt bound in honor to himself and
his state to keep the same open hand and ready welcome as of yore. His
overseer describes his own hopeless efforts to keep these travelling
friends and admirers from eating his master out of house and home:--

"They were there all times of the year; but about the middle of
June the travel would commence from the lower part of the State to
the Springs, and then there was a perfect throng of visitors. They
travelled in their own carriages and came in gan