tors rose to rule over them, and their children went astray.
See yonder sad-colored house, with its cabins and fences and glad
crops! It is not glad within; last month the prodigal son of the
struggling father wrote home from the city for money. Money! Where
was it to come from? And so the son rose in the night and killed his
baby, and killed his wife, and shot himself dead. And the world passed
on.

I remember wheeling around a bend in the road beside a graceful bit of
forest and a singing brook. A long low house faced us, with porch and
flying pillars, great oaken door, and a broad lawn shining in the
evening sun. But the window-panes were gone, the pillars were
worm-eaten, and the moss-grown roof was falling in. Half curiously I
peered through the unhinged door, and saw where, on the wall across the
hall, was written in once gay letters a faded "Welcome."

Quite a contrast to the southwestern part of Dougherty County is the
northwest. Soberly timbered in oak and pine, it has none of that
half-tropical luxuriance of the southwest. Then, too, there are fewer
signs of a romantic past, and more of systematic modern land-grabbing
and money-getting. White people are more in evidence here, and farmer
and hired labor replace to some extent the absentee landlord and
rack-rented tenant. The crops have neither the luxuriance of the
richer land nor the signs of neglect so often seen, and there were
fences and meadows here and there. Most of this land was poor, and
beneath the notice of the slave-baron, before the war. Since then his
poor relations and foreign immigrants have seized it. The returns of
the farmer are too small to allow much for wages, and yet he will not
sell off small farms. There is the Negro Sanford; he has worked
fourteen years as overseer on the Ladson place, and "paid out enough
for fertilizers to have bought a farm," but the owner will not sell off
a few acres.

Two children--a boy and a girl--are hoeing sturdily in the fields on
the farm where Corliss works. He is smooth-faced and brown, and is
fencing up his pigs. He used to run a successful cotton-gin, but the
Cotton Seed Oil Trust has forced the price of ginning so low that he
says it hardly pays him. He points out a stately old house over the
way as the home of "Pa Willis." We eagerly ride over, for "Pa Willis"
was the tall and powerful black Moses who led the Negroes for a
generation, and led them well. He was a Baptist preache