A Virginia Cavalier by Molly Elliot Seawell

Next morning, as usual, George was up and on horseback by sunrise. Until this year he had ridden five miles a day each way to Mr. Hobby's school; but now he was so far ahead of the school-master's classes that he only went a few times a week, to study surveying and the higher mathematics, and to have the week's study at home marked out for him. Every morning, however, it was his duty to ride over the whole plantation before breakfast, and to report the condition of everything in it to his mother. Madam Washington was one of the best farmers in the colony, and it was her custom, after hearing George's account at breakfast, to mount her horse and ride over the place also, and give her orders for the day.

The first long lances of light were just tipping the woods and the river when George came out and found his horse held by Billy Lee, a negro lad of about his own age, who was his body-servant and shadow.[A] Billy was a chocolate-colored youth, the son of Aunt Sukey the cook and Uncle Jasper the butler. He had but one idea and one ideal on earth, and that was "Marse George. " It was in vain that Madam Washington, the strictest of disciplinarians, might lay her commands on Billy. Until he had found out what "Marse George" wanted him to do, Billy seemed unconscious of having got any orders. Madam Washington, who could awe much older and wiser persons than Billy, had often sent for the boy, when he was regularly taken into the house, and after reasoning with him, kindly explaining to him that both "Marse George" and himself were merely boys, and under her authority, would give him a stern reproof, which Billy always received in an abstracted silence, as if he had not heard a word that was said to him. Finding that he acted throughout as if he had not heard, Madam Washington turned him over to Aunt Sukey, who, after the fashion of those days, with white boys as well as black, gave him a smart birching. Billy's roars were like the trumpeting of an elephant; but within a week he went back to his old way of forgetting there was anybody in the world except "Marse George. " Then Madam Washington turned him over to Uncle Jasper, who "lay" that he would "meck dat little triflin' nigger min' missis."