es are mixed in there; but the
white coach is all white. Of course this car is not so good as the
other, but it is fairly clean and comfortable. The discomfort lies
chiefly in the hearts of those four black men yonder--and in mine.

We rumble south in quite a business-like way. The bare red clay and
pines of Northern Georgia begin to disappear, and in their place
appears a rich rolling land, luxuriant, and here and there well tilled.
This is the land of the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians
had to seize it. The towns grow more frequent and more interesting,
and brand-new cotton mills rise on every side. Below Macon the world
grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt,--that strange land of
shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now
only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond. The "Jim
Crow Car" grows larger and a shade better; three rough field-hands and
two or three white loafers accompany us, and the newsboy still spreads
his wares at one end. The sun is setting, but we can see the great
cotton country as we enter it,--the soil now dark and fertile, now thin
and gray, with fruit-trees and dilapidated buildings,--all the way to
Albany.

At Albany, in the heart of the Black Belt, we stop. Two hundred miles
south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one
hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten
thousand Negroes and two thousand whites. The Flint River winds down
from Andersonville, and, turning suddenly at Albany, the county-seat,
hurries on to join the Chattahoochee and the sea. Andrew Jackson knew
the Flint well, and marched across it once to avenge the Indian
Massacre at Fort Mims. That was in 1814, not long before the battle of
New Orleans; and by the Creek treaty that followed this campaign, all
Dougherty County, and much other rich land, was ceded to Georgia.
Still, settlers fought shy of this land, for the Indians were all
about, and they were unpleasant neighbors in those days. The panic of
1837, which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren, turned the planters from
the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east Georgia,
toward the West. The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and
settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken
fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a
great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory,