ow facetiously called "The Ark," and were soon
in the open country, and on the confines of the great plantations of
other days. There is the "Joe Fields place"; a rough old fellow was
he, and had killed many a "nigger" in his day. Twelve miles his
plantation used to run,--a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now;
only straggling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to
Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily mortgaged,
and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants. Here is one of them
now,--a tall brown man, a hard worker and a hard drinker, illiterate,
but versed in farmlore, as his nodding crops declare. This
distressingly new board house is his, and he has just moved out of
yonder moss-grown cabin with its one square room.

From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, a dark comely face
is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages are not every-day
occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent yellow man with a
good-sized family, and manages a plantation blasted by the war and now
the broken staff of the widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but
he carouses too much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of
neglect born of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In
times past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have
rotted away.

The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken. Here are the remnants of
the vast plantations of the Sheldons, the Pellots, and the Rensons; but
the souls of them are passed. The houses lie in half ruin, or have
wholly disappeared; the fences have flown, and the families are
wandering in the world. Strange vicissitudes have met these whilom
masters. Yonder stretch the wide acres of Bildad Reasor; he died in
war-time, but the upstart overseer hastened to wed the widow. Then he
went, and his neighbors too, and now only the black tenant remains; but
the shadow-hand of the master's grand-nephew or cousin or creditor
stretches out of the gray distance to collect the rack-rent
remorselessly, and so the land is uncared-for and poor. Only black
tenants can stand such a system, and they only because they must. Ten
miles we have ridden to-day and have seen no white face.

A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the
gaudy sunshine and the green cottonfields. This, then, is the Cotton
Kingdom,--the shadow of a marvellous dream. And where is the King?
Perhaps this is he,--the sweatin