Our summer seat, or the sand hill, as the slaves used to call it, was
four miles from the plantation. Among the four hundred and sixty-five
slaves owned by the colonel there were a great many children. If my
readers had visited Col. Singleton's plantation the last of May or the
first of June in the days of slavery, they would have seen three or four
large plantation wagons loaded with little negroes of both sexes, of
various complexions and conditions, who were being carried to this
summer residence, and among them they would have found the author of
this little work in his sand-hill days.

My readers would naturally ask how many seasons these children were
taken to the summer seats? I answer, until, in the judgment of the
overseer, they were large enough to work; then they were kept at the
plantation. How were they fed? There were three or four women who were
too old to work on the plantation who were sent as nurses to the summer
seats with the children; they did the cooking. The way in which these
old women cooked for 80, and sometimes 150 children, in my sand-hill
days, was this:--they had two or three large pots, which held about a
bushel each, in which they used to cook corn flour, stirred with large
wooden paddles. The food was dealt out with the paddles into each
child's little wooden tray or tin pail, which was furnished by the
parents according to their ability.

With this corn flour, which the slaves called mush, each child used to
get a gill of sour milk brought daily from the plantation in a large
wooden pail on the head of a boy or man. We children used to like the
sour milk, or hard clabber as it was called by the slaves; but that
seldom changed diet, namely the mush, was hated worse than medicine. Our
hatred was increased against the mush from the fact that they used to