ecting his forces into new channels. Having worked
a plantation, when he had no longer any plantation to work he was
compelled to send his negroes into the street to earn an eleemosynary
living for him. This was no obloquy. How many such men has every
Southern traveller seen,--"sons of the first South Carolina
families,"--parodying the Caryatides against the sunny wall of some low
grog-shop during a whole winter afternoon,--their eyes listless, their
hands in their pockets, their legs outstretched, their backs bent, their
conversation a languid mixture of Cracker dialect and overseer slang,
their negroes' earnings running down their throats at intervals, as they
change their outside for a temporary inside position,--and all the
well-dressed citizens addressing them cheerfully as "Colonel" and
"Major," without a blush of shame, as they go by! Goldwin Smith was
right in pointing at such men as one of the former palliations for the
social invectives of the foreign tourist,--though any such tourist with
brains need not have mistaken them for sample Americans, having already
been in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The trouble is, that foreign
tourists, as a rule, do _not_ have brains. At any rate, they may say to
us, as Artemus Ward of his gifts of eloquence,--"I _have_ them, but--I
haven't got them with me."

Sol Cutter paid his master eight dollars a week. As he had to keep
himself out of his remainder earnings, he was naturally more
enterprising than most slaves, and I took a fancy to him immediately.
From the day I found him, he always went out with me on my long rows.

The middle of a river six miles wide is the safest place that can be
found at the South for insurrectionary conversation. Even there I used
to wonder whether the Southerners had not given secret-service money to
the alligators who occasionally stuck their knobby noses above the flood
to scent our colloquies.

Sol was pulling away steadily, having "got his second wind" at the end
of the first mile. I was sitting with tiller-ropes in hand, and studying
his strong-featured, but utterly expressionless face, with deep
curiosity. His face was one over which the hot roller of a great agony
has passed, smoothing out all its meaning.

"So your master sells you your time?"

"Yes, Mossa." (Always "_Mossa_" never "_Massa_," so far South as this.)

"Do you support your wife and children as well as yourself?"

A convulsive gulp on the part of Sol, but no rep