the
former from the united weight of both to find the quantity
of tobacco offered for sale. A small planter has brought a
lot of loose tobacco to market, which, being sold, was
weighed in this manner, and for which the purchaser was
about to pay, when a bystander quietly remarked, 'You forgot
to weigh the nigger.' An explanation followed, and the
tobacco, re-weighed, was found short 158 lbs., or the exact
weight of the colored driver, who had, unobserved, been
standing on the scales behind the cart while the first
weighing took place.

"Thirty years or more ago--before the Danville and Southside
Railroads were built--the tobacco was principally carried to
market on flat-boats, and the refrain to a favorite negro
song was:--

"'Oh, I'm gwine down to Town!
An' I'm gwine down to Town!
I'm gwine down to Richmond Town
To cayr my 'bacca down!'

"Then all along the rivers, at every landing, was a tobacco
warehouse, the ruins of some of which may still be seen.
With no crop has the Emancipation Act interfered so much as
with this, and the old tobacco planters will tell you with a
sigh that tobacco no longer yields them the profits it once
did: the manufacturers are the only people who make fortunes
on it now-a-days; $12 per hundred is the lowest price which
pays for the raising, and few crops average that now. Still
every farmer essays its culture, every freedman has his
email tobacco patch by his cabin door, and the Indian weed
is still the great staple of Eastern Virginia."

The first planters of tobacco at the West were the Ohioans, who began
its culture about fifty years ago. From the first they have taken much
interest in the plant, and as the result of many experiments not only
produce seed leaf, but the finest cutting leaf grown in this country.
The Ohio tobacco growers have shown a spirit of enterprise in this
direction that is as commendable as it is rare. While they have not
tested the great tropical varieties like their brother tobacco growers
of Connecticut, they have succeeded in producing a leaf for cutting
that is the admiration of the world. At first their experiments were
unsuccessful, and the early growers were ridiculed for entertaining
the belief that tobacco could be grown at the West. Yet despite all
objections and seeming failur