) for
three weeks or a month at a time and then enjoy all the pleasures C^{rs}
Town affords." Truly a versatile young person, this Eliza of long ago!

That her planting was no holiday business is shown by a memorandum of
July 1739:

"I wrote my father a very long letter on his
plantation affairs . . . on the pains I had taken to
bring the Indigo, Ginger, Cotton, Lucern, and
Cassada to perfection, and had greater hopes from
the Indigo--if I could have the seed earlier the
next year from the West Indies,--than any of ye
rest of y^e things I had tryd, . . . also concerning
pitch and tarr and lime and other plantation
affairs."

As has been said before, Eliza's ambition was to follow out her father's
plan, to discover some crop which could be raised successfully as a
staple export, and the determination and perseverance with which she set
out to accomplish the task, shows that she was made of no ordinary
stuff, even at sixteen, when the majority of girls were occupied with
far different activity and diversions. Indigo seems to have been the
crop most likely to succeed, and to that Eliza turned her attention with
the intensity of purpose which marked all her actions. It was no easy
achievement to cultivate indigo, as it required very careful preparation
of the soil, much attention during its growth, and a long and critical
process to prepare it for the market. After a series of experiments, she
reported to her father:

I wrote you in a former letter we had a fine crop
of Indigo seed upon the ground and since informed
you the frost took it before it was dry. I picked
out the best of it and had it planted but there is
not more than a hundred bushes of it come up,
w^{ch} proves the more unlucky, as you have sent a
man to make it. I make no doubt Indigo will prove
a very valueable commodity in time, if we could
have the seed from the east Indies time enough to
plant the latter end of March, that the seed might
be dry enough to gather before our frost. I am
sorry we lost this season we can do nothing
towards it now but make the works ready for next
year.

The death of my Grandmamma was as you imagine very
shocking and grevious to my Mama, but I hope the
considerati