g ploughman, tilling his eighty acres
with two lean mules, and fighting a hard battle with debt. So we sit
musing, until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a
fairer scene suddenly in view,--a neat cottage snugly ensconced by the
road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed man rises from the
porch as we hail him, and comes out to our carriage. He is six feet in
height, with a sober face that smiles gravely. He walks too straight
to be a tenant,--yes, he owns two hundred and forty acres. "The land
is run down since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty," he
explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his place,
and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco, snuff, soap,
and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his gin-house with new
machinery just installed. Three hundred bales of cotton went through
it last year. Two children he has sent away to school. Yes, he says
sadly, he is getting on, but cotton is down to four cents; I know how
Debt sits staring at him.

Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the Cotton Kingdom
have not wholly disappeared. We plunge even now into great groves of
oak and towering pine, with an undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.
This was the "home-house" of the Thompsons,--slave-barons who drove
their coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and ashes,
and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune into the rising
cotton industry of the fifties, and with the falling prices of the
eighties he packed up and stole away. Yonder is another grove, with
unkempt lawn, great magnolias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House
stands in half-ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the
street, and the back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A
shabby, well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard
to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the place. She
married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.

Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,--Shepherd's, they
call it,--a great whitewashed barn of a thing, perched on stilts of
stone, and looking for all the world as though it were just resting
here a moment and might be expected to waddle off down the road at
almost any time. And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes;
and sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and near
gather here and talk and eat and sing. There is a schoolhouse near,--a