Page (1853-1922) was an American lawyer and writer who also served as the US ambassador to Italy under President Woodrow Wilson during World War I. He descended from the Page and Nelson families, each First Families of Virginia, and grew up on one of the family plantations. After practicing law in Richmond from 1876-93 he grew disillusioned with the Southern legal system and moved to Washington DC, giving up law entirely to concentrate on his writing. Page popularized the plantation tradition genre of Southern writing which idealized life before the Civil War, and based much of his writing on his own experience of plantation life in the Antebellum South. This sketch of Virginia life, illustrated throughout, was first published in 1897.