Socially, as well as geographically, Mr. Tompkins' home combined the extremes of the North and South. He, with his calm face and mild gray eyes, was a native of the green hills of New Hampshire, while his dark-eyed wife was a daughter of sunny Georgia.
Mrs. Tompkins was the only child of a wealthy Georgia planter. Mr. Tompkins had met her first in Atlanta, where he was spending the Winter with a class-mate, both having graduated at Yale the year before. Their meeting grew into intimacy, from intimacy it ripened into love. Shortly after the marriage of his daughter, his only child, the planter exchanged his property for more extensive possessions in Virginia, but he never occupied this new home. He and his wife were in New Orleans, when the dread malady, yellow-fever, seized upon them, and they died before their daughter or her husband could go to them.
Mr. Tompkins, a man who had always been opposed to slavery, thus found himself the owner of a large plantation in Virginia, and more than a hundred slaves. There seemed to be no other alternative, and he accepted the situation, and tried, by being a humane master, to conciliate his wounded conscience for being a master at all.
He and his only brother, Henry, had inherited a large and valuable property from their father, in their native State. His brother, like himself, had gone South and married a planter's daughter, and become a large slave-holder. He was a far different man from his brother. Naturally overbearing and cruel, he seemed to possess none of the other's kindness of heart or cool, dispassionate reason. He was a hard task-master, and no "fire-eating" Southerner ever exercised his power more remorselessly than he, and no one hated the Abolition party more cordially. But it is not with Henry Tompkins we have to deal at present.
It was near noon the day after the travelers reached Jerry Lycan's inn. Mrs. Tompkins sat on the piazza, looking down the road that led to the village. She was one of those Southern beauties who attract at a first glance; her eyes large, and dark, and brilliant; her hair soft and glossy, like waves of lustrous silk. Of medium height, though not quite so slender as when younger, her form was faultless. Her cheek had the olive tint of the South, and as she reclined with indolent grace in her easy chair, one little foot restlessly tapping the carpet on which it rested, she looked a very queen.