Excerpt from: Pringle, Elizabeth W. Allston. Chronicles of Chicora Wood. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1922. Image: "Chicora Wood," photograph by Amelia M. Watson, p244. Digitized by Google Books. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
Her father took second place always in her narrative, though he was a most delightful companion - very clever and full of wit, a great reader, and it was his habit to read aloud in the evenings, while the family sat around the fire, each one with some appointed task. The elder girls sewed, while all the children had their baskets of cotton to pick, for in those days the gin had not been invented and the seed had to be carefully picked from the cotton by hand! It would seem a weary task to us, but they regarded it as a game, and ran races as to who should pick the most during the long winter evenings while my grandfather read Milton, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, and other masters of literature. When one contrasts those evenings, those influences on the minds of children with the amusements and diversions deemed necessary to the young of the present day, one does not wonder at the pleasure loving race we are becoming.
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