ger, the principal negro-dealer
at Lexington, who boarded at McGowan's Hotel, where I was then stopping,
and he introduced me to a Mississippi planter' who was there buying a
few hands for his plantation back of Grand Gulf. Talbot (that was the
planter's name) seemed to take a fancy to me, and finally proposed to me
to go with him to Mississippi and serve as assistant overseer. He
offered me a salary of eight hundred dollars a year; said I should have
a horse to ride over the plantation, a servant to wait on me, and an
easy time of it generally. I accepted the offer, and accompanied him
down the river. We took down fifteen niggars whom he had purchased in
Kentucky, mostly at Lexington. I was there two years, and left heartily
sick of it.'

'Well, that is an episode in your history, Tom,' I said, 'that I could
never have imagined. But now you must tell me something about plantation
life. I have heard and read a great deal about it, but never had it from
the mouth of an old friend on whose word I could rely, and who possessed
the advantage of having been an overseer himself.'

'Oh! there is very little to tell,' said Tom. 'I had to set the niggars
at work and see that they performed their tasks; that was all.'

'Well, what crops did you cultivate?'

'Cotton.'

'How many hands did you work?'

'About seventy-five. There were some hundred and fifty on the
plantation, altogether, big and little.

'What did the women do?'

'Women?' said Tom, with a slight note of interrogation. 'We didn't know
any thing about women: they were all _hands_. When I was driving stock
to New-York, I treated oxen and cows all alike; and on our plantation
all the able-bodied hands worked together in the field, and no
difference was made between them. There were old, decrepit wenches,
unable to work, who took care of the children during the day. When the
mothers came from the field at night they suckled their picaninies--for
nearly all the women have babies. They breed like rabbits,' added Tom,
'in postscript.'

'But what did _you_ know about raising cotton?' I asked.

'Nothing, of course,' he replied, 'you must remember that I was second
overseer. The head overseer took the chief management of affairs. But
when I had been there about three months, Blake died--that was my
chief's name--then the whole charge of the plantation then devolved on
me. Talbot was North, spending the summer. I wrote to him at Saratoga,
informing of the death of B