Plantation Life in Arkansas

THE plantation that I know best lies in the heart of the cypress forest on the Black River. You may find the Black River (if you look for it on the larger maps of Arkansas; it has not sufficient rank to be named on the small maps) in the northeastern part of the State, a sinuous, evasive thread of a stream, that doubles on its track and twists and curves until it reaches the White River (which is large enough for all the maps), and so the Mississippi. There you have the route by which our cotton sails to Memphis.

The scene from my window, as I write, is like that to be seen, this February morning, on hundreds of Arkansas plantations. Willow-shaded river, where bare twigs already show the dull red blur that is the first harbinger of the forest pageantry of spring ; a wide plain greening under the February sun; fields with mouse-colored fences and freshly turned black furrows; away in the distance, negroes and mules ploughing ; down the lane, a belated cotton wagon crawling to the gin, a few cows among the trees, a black pig here and there rooting under the fences, and a dozen horses, with ragged saddles, tied to the hitching-bar ” under the great willow oak in front of the store; whitewashed houses in the fields; a big white store by the riverside; further down the bank, a big black mill; and everywhere the horizon blocked by the cypress wall, — this is a typical Arkansas landscape.

Not so typical, rather due to the planter’s original scheme of color (and something to the accident of paints in stock), are the trig little blue, pink, and yellow houses scattered among the whitewashed cabins and farmhouses of an earlier day. For all their gay tints, they are as much less picturesque than their shabby comrades as they are more comfortable.

Ours, in a humble degree, is a historic plantation; it dates back to the old Spanish and French days, when Arkansas was the wild north of Louisiana. The old willow oak, that for at least a hundred years must have spread its giant limbs and expanded its huge trunk unhampered, may have sheltered gay French adventurers or solemn Spaniards. Certainly the Spaniards passed us, it they did not land, since one corner of the plantation abuts a tract known as the “Spanish grant.” It is in shape a quadrangle, with one side gnawed away by the river. The Spaniards came up the river in their pirogues. and, not taking the trouble to survey the land, or having no instruments with them, marked out the space they wanted from tree to tree. The original grant was kept in our safe for a long time: a queer old yellow parchment, sealed with the arms of Spain.

The Frenchmen came, too. A colony of them settled on land adjoining ours, and their descendants still own the property. A few of the settlers were cadets of noble families who had strayed to the New World, and names of gallants who danced and sparkled at the court of Louis le Grand are borne by ragged farmers whose single pair of stockings will be worn out tramping at the ploughtail or guiding the cotton planter.

At this period the plantation was a dense cane brake, full of bears and deer. Later, it was settled in spots by hardy backwoodsmen from North Carolina and Tennessee. From them, but principally from the United States government, the first planter acquired his title. He brought a troop of slaves ; built the mill, the store, and the older houses; and maintained for years a rude and patriarchal pomp. His great house, adorning the knoll behind the cedars, was framed, not of any native wood, the gum or cypress or oak, but of pine that was rowed to him on the water highway, every board of which was dressed by hand. Not to slight his own forests too much, his fences were made of black walnut, sacrificing I know not how many noble trees.

The house faced the river, and, with its well-houses, ice-house, smoke-house, store-house, and all the medley of servants’ quarters, reared an imposing front.

Before the house glowed a garden that was the wonder of the countryside, a brilliant fairyland of gorgeous exotics, and beds of native flowers laid out in the formal geometric shapes that our grandmothers loved. Shelley’s wonderful garden could not look fairer than this must have looked to the inexperienced eyes of those who drifted past it on the boats and rafts. Also,

Whether poor Mattie R——’s charms would make any further quotation apposite one dare not decide, at this distance. She cherished flowers; she painted in oils; and half the young men of the county were in love with her. She is dead, now; dead, too. are her husband and children; and, long ago, her father, who had seen his other children fade and die, hid all earthly disappointments in the dark. Strangers rule the beautiful acres that he dreamed would descend to his children’s children. The very house that he built caught fire one night, and burned to the ground. Not a brick of the huge chimney, not a shrub of the garden once so fondly tended, remains to appeal to the imagination in behalf of that vanished, half-barbaric state.

Some of the pious will have it that Colonel R——’s bereavements were a judgment because he was an infidel, a character of rare atrocity in those days, far more shocking to Arkansas morality than a murderer. Murderers, indeed, there were in plenty, right hand and left, but Colonel R——was the first avowed atheist that any of his neighbors had ever seen. They used to tell in awed whispers of his godless library and his wicked eloquence defending his tenets, and how he raved when his favorite son was converted to Christianity, at college.

During the war the old pagan fared better than his neighbors. Back of the house was a dense thicket, where he hid his valuables, — silver, meat, and salt from the Federals, and cotton from the Confederates. This was at the time of Shelby’s order to burn all the cotton, lest it fall into the hands of the Federals. Never was a bitterer secessionist than Colonel R——; but, assured that the Southern hopes were dead, he had no mind to waste his good cotton on a funeral pyre.

Tradition asserts that he buried large sums of money, in bright gold pieces, a treasure that his sudden death prevented his removing; and many a gold hunter has vainly digged the earth in every direction about the site of the old house.

The war has left other traces in the legends. Both armies marched down the river, on one bank or the other. But the tragedies of the war come from the free-lance warriors, the guerrillas or graybacks, who, whatever their titles and pretenses, were in reality mere outlaws, hunted down by both armies. There is no occasion to compassionate them; robbery, murder, torture, blasted their track through the valley. Across the river is a lonesome little cypress brake, where a few chimney bricks still recall how the guerrillas murdered a whole family for their scanty hoard of greenbacks, and burned their bones under their home.

Cruelty sometimes took ghastly, mediæval shapes. The outlaws tormented men by fire, pouring hot coals down their backs or slowly roasting them; twice they pulled out a man’s nails; innumerable times they flogged people cruelly; while the worst of their deviltry cannot be described. The natural result was that they were hunted down and exterminated like wolves.

Do we come to blood-stained legends, there is an endless store, for the passions had free play during the turbulent years after the war. From every window in the house you can see spots where men have been killed. The trampled green in front of the store has been the arena of a dozen fights. Wherever you drive along the country roads, you pass the scene of violent death. I remember the planter’s driving his New England sister and us to a little town, nine miles away. He stopped so often to relate how “a man was killed just here ” that his sister finally exclaimed : “If Frank stops everywhere somebody was killed, we sha’n’t get to Portia until dark! I never was in such a gory country! ”

Yet to-day a more peaceful, lawabiding people than ours you will not find anywhere. Beyond a few harsh insinuations connecting chickens and the gypsies who camp every year down by the “slash.” we have not a cloud on our honesty. Even our negroes do not steal. The only robbery that I know to have happened in the vicinity was the taking of Thomas Jefferson Peps’s boat, and in that lone case the thieves came down the river, —wicked, professional thieves from Missouri, whose dishonesty must not be charged to the account of the State of Arkansas.

What an excitement it caused! Thomas Jefferson took command of a company of mill hands, farm hands, and tenants, and rowed in hot pursuit, returning in triumph with both thieves and booty. Then, how inspiring was the spectacle at the store, converted into a temple of justice: the miserable criminals tilting their chairs before the office stove; the ministers of justice leaning their guns against the glass partition that divides office from store; Justice, in the person of Squire Holmes, enthroned at the desk; the witnesses, like Milton’s Samson, “lying at random, carelessly diffused ” over the front doorsteps; and an interested audience, flattening their black and white noses against the other side of the partition, in the store beyond. The thieves were condemned, and packed off that same day. They are now serving their country in the penitentiary; and, as heretofore, we go away in the evening, leaving our doors unlocked, with a tranquil mind.

A plantation, to-day, is generally an estate, a group of little farms, rented on shares. A fourth of the cotton or a third of the corn is the usual rental. The tenant, or, in our language, “ the renter,” has credit at the store for the probable amount of his crop. The store will supply him with all the necessaries, from drugs to agricultural implements, including occasional advances of cash.

At first, to a Northerner, it is a little startling to hear a ragged fellow, who has just bought sugar and pork, add, in the most matter-of-fact way, “And I want five dollars.” But generally the clerk makes no more ado about giving the money than is made over the asking. This is the muchabused truck system, which, like a good many other devices of a primitive social state, it is easier to abuse than to improve. Certain it is that no system gives the absolutely penniless man such an opportunity. Sometimes, the renter will have nothing beyond his grimy hands and the rags on his back. The planter finds him a house, some rude kind of furniture, a pair of mules, and the necessary farm tools, and enough coarse provision to feed him until he can market his crop. Wood is always free for the cutting. Frequently, a renter will be given the use of a cow. Pigs and chickens cost a mere trifle, and all stock hunts its own livelihood in the woods. Occasionally, a renter, in Arkansas idiom, “ lights a shuck, ” or, more briefly, “lights out.” He thus abandons his cotton; but he also leaves behind him his big debt on the store ledger.

Such abrupt departures are favored by the negroes, from a variety of domestic motives as well as from financial troubles; the African having a trick of slipping off the matrimonial chains whenever they gall. Last year there was a notable instance; notable, not on account of the flitting, but for the lurid and complicated lie that the deserting husband concocted. He had come here from Tennessee, and was scarce a year married to a girl on the place. Tom — his name was Tom — went about among the negro renters in his part of the plantation representing that while in Tennessee, on Colonel De Braeey’s plantation, he had most innocently brought himself within the compass of the law. Colonel De Bracey had given him a bottle of whiskey, “kase he ben chillin’ terrible bad,” and he took this whiskey with him to a house that he was helping to build, where they all wanted some of the whiskey; and he couldn’t give all of his whiskey away, but he did sell them four or five drinks, at ten cents a drink. And that was how they got a warrant out against him for selling whiskey without a license. So he ran away from Tennessee; and now he had just got a letter (which he actually had taken the pains to write to himself and post at the post office in the store) warning him that his place of refuge was known, and the constable was “a-pursuin’ of him, and dey all would sho’ send him to the penitentiary. If he ben a white man, dey might turn him loose; but a colored man never had no chance!”

Tom’s plaints worked on his auditors’ feelings to the extent that out of their poverty they raised a little purse for him: and good, thrifty Uncle Ned Looney lent him ten dollars, and John Etta (who is not a man, but a woman, John’s Etta, Uncle Ned’s daughter-inlaw) drove him before sunrise to the Memphis railway station; and thus he departed with the sympathy of all. Previously, he had obtained another ten dollars “ on account ” at the store, to pay as “ boot ” for a mule of extraordinary virtues.

So plausible was the entire drama that the planter himself was gulled. He sent word to Tom that he would protect him, dispatched Uncle Ned after the runaway to fetch him back, and wrote to Colonel De Bracey. Alas for Tom’s good name! the grim facts appeared. Colonel De Bracey never gave Tom any whiskey, Tom never sold any whiskey, Tom never had any whiskey to sell, —in fine, it was a lie out of whole cloth; and the selfsame lie that Tom had used before, when he ran away from his crop, his wife, and his debts, in Tennessee.

Why Tom took so much trouble may be explained by the supposition that he found desertion cheaper than divorce or separation. A divorce is a costly convenience; one must pay twenty-five dollars to have Justice cleave the fetters. In consequence, the negro usually does one of two things: he runs away, as Tom did, or he peaceably “parts.”

We had a little black maid who was once explaining her family relations: “Big sister, she’s Aunt Fanny Packer’s chile, but I ’se mamma’s chile. You see, papa an’ Aunt Fanny, dey was married an’ dey pahted, an’ den papa an’ mamma was married.”

Both “ mamma, ” otherwise Mrs. James Rateliffe, or “ Sis Ma’y Ratcliffe,” and “Aunt Fanny,” or Mrs. Dick Packer, are persons of high standing in the colored community, wealthy people, who own cows and swine and mules and big “cook-stoves,” and lead in the church.

A division of property is expected to accompany such amicable partings. The planter (who indeed officiates at most of the primitive functions of Justice) has a session at the store for the parting couple, and the property is divided with less formality than in the legal courts, but with quite as much equity.

The sequel to the parting is usually the choosing of a new partner. The women are not much more moral than the men, even the best of them. Aunt Lucy, who cooks for the planter’s family, never has been touched by the breath of scandal; but there is Aunt Lucy’s eldest daughter, who has had two “misfortunes,” the elder being now ten years old; and Susan Tweed, the best worker on the plantation, whose credit at the store will reach to a horse or a sewing-machine, has made mischief in a dozen dusky households, and is as callous about her sins as Catherine of Russia.

I cannot better illustrate this deplorable phase of the negro’s transition state than by Ben Boker’s comment on his latest baby. The wee Boker came into the world with a vast deal more disturbance than is usual here, where babies are considerate, making little fuss over their advent, and expecting little attention afterwards. “Ben up all night,” grumbled Ben; “never did see sicher time. But hit’s de las’! Never cotch me in sech a fix agin,— least not at home ! ”

The negro usually makes a very decent tenant. More than half of our “renters ” (some hundreds in number) are black. I should say the same proportion maintains with our own servants. All of them have been amiable, one of them was industrious, one was moral; as a whole, they have mildly encouraged our hopes for the future of the man and the brother; but Brother Eustace Grinnell, who “waited on us ” last, certainly was as “trifling ” a black man as ever destroyed the Northern illusions or excused the Southern shotgun.

Eustace is so stupid that you would pity him for being born, if he were not so cruel to animals that you can’t. It was a sight to make fear, as our Gallic friends would say, Eustace milking the cows. He always milked with two fingers, in the uncanny fashion of the country, and always stood — when he was n’t chasing the cows. For some occult reason, connected with his abnormal intellect, I suppose, he never fed the cows at milking-time.—no, that would give them too much to occupy their minds; he preferred to chase them over the back yard, making futile dives at them, the function commonly ending in a grand and lofty tumbling act, with a somersault by the milk pail.

But his happiest exploit was cleaning the turkey. We did not expect him, when he moved the stoves, to get them back again in safety, and it was no surprise to see the stovepipe towering above the hole, while Eustace Stared, mouth agape, muttering, “It done growed! ” But we did suppose that he, a farm darky, knew how to clean a turkey. We had underrated his genius for blunders. He split the turkey laboriously up its breastbone, from the neck to the tip of the spine; and the appearance of that large fowl flopping palely over the platter is beyond words to describe!

The most repulsive trait in the negro’s character is his atrocious relish of cruelty. It exceeds apathy over other creatures’ pain; it is veritable enjoyment. Look at the flashing of teeth at the struggles of a broken-backed cat or a half-decapitated chicken! Hear the spectators laugh! They are as pleased as if you had given them a drink of whiskey. Yet in these brutal torturers of animals you may find not only ardent affections and a pathetic loyalty, but generosity, cheerfulness, sunny good humor, the social instincts, and an amazing meekness under provocation.

The paradox bewildered us; but my own notion of the explanation is that the cruelty of the negroes, like the cruelty of children, comes from a torpid imagination. They have not sense enough to realize the misery that they inflict. It is the grotesque antics, not the suffering, of the cat or chicken that delight them. Eustace, — here is a corroboration of the theory, —being the very stupidest negro that ever served us, was also the most cruel.

Our negroes are neither more nor less superstitious than their kind in the South generally. The conjurer makes a figure here as elsewhere. In Arkansas we are not voodooed, and we are rarely hoodooed, but we are frequently conjured. The conjurer is a homelier personage than the weird witch queen of Louisiana. He — or she — rents his land, makes a crop, and trades at the store, like any ordinary black mortal; the conjure business is a kind of side show. He sells herbs and potions and charms, and if custom lags he can scare it into activity by his baneful arts ; for not only has he all the common stock in trade, mysterious sickness, blasted crops, and the like, but he of Arkansas owns the gift of throwing lizards into objectionable darkies! This has been done on our plantation more than once, as most respectable colored testimony will vouch, with fatal effect.

Happily, the planter has a strong “conjure medicine,” known to the world as Epsom salts, the use of which is attended by the best results. We did have a conjure doctor, but he died. The most powerful conjurer in these regions is “old man Brown.” Singularly enough, although this old scoundrel is suspected of two or three murders, he is a member of the church, “in good and regular standing. ”

“How can that be? ” one of us asked our man Albert, — not Eustace, who knows no more about conjuring than he does about anything else; and Albert, grinning, answered; “Dunno; he say he got ’surance of salvation. Reckon dey all doesn’t das tu’n him out.

The trade in charms is always brisk. A rabbit’s left hind foot has a steady value. The skin of the rabbit’s stomach is of great use in helping babies to cut their teeth; it should be tied round the child’s neck. A great deal depends on the moon. If you plant by the dark of the moon, expect trouble. You should never “kill ” by the dark of the moon, either, for the meat will “all cripse up in the pan, ” or, if you boil it, it will boil away. This lore is believed by whites and blacks alike. The whites have no fear of the direful conjurer, but ghosts or “ha’nts” scare them as readily as the negroes.

The plantation abounds in spirits of an uneasy turn of mind. A large white ghost haunts the lane; nobody seems to know why, since nothing tragic has ever happened there. Years ago, that long, smooth road was the racecourse on which the young fellows of the neighborhood used to run their horses. Those were the days when the barrel of whiskey rolled into the stores as regularly as the barrel of molasses. Saturday night revels were certain to follow the Saturday afternoon races; and it must be a poor white man that could not earn the right to a thumping headache for Sunday morning. There was not much ready money to stake, but horses, cows, saddles, guns, even houses and lands, used to change hands. A common challenge was, “I ’ll bet twenty dollars in good property ! ”

The answer would be. “Name your property! ”

“My claybank colt. What you got against it ? ”

“My two heifers.”

Thus the bet would be arranged. Wagers ran high, and in their excitement the gamblers would bet the very clothes off their backs. One poor spendthrift lost his trousers — and paid on the spot.

But there was a side that was not ludicrous. It was only a step between an altercation and a brandished knife or lowered gun, in those days; there were quarrels and ruined men, and sobbing women at home. Perhaps the racecourse ghost has a title to his spectral beat under the gum-trees.

Albert met him, once. He (the ghost, not Albert, who has the warm tone of a stovepipe) was white, and he had no head. He was n’t “doin’ nary, jest sa’nterin’ along. ”

“And what did you do, Albert?” said the white listener.

“I p’intedly run, ma’am.” said Albert.

There is a ghost at the store, living upstairs with the merchandise, and never making any trouble. There is the ugly-tempered ghost that at intervals slapped a poor murderer on the cheek with his cold and viewless hand, until the victim killed himself. There is an undoubted ghost that gibbers and shrieks and rolls in the mud before the empty cabin, which no renter is hold enough to take, since the last tenant died — close to that rotten pump — of the bite of a mad dog.

We ourselves have a “ha’nt ” in the house.

There once lived on the plantation an erratic reformer, a sort of rural Artegal. I have tried elsewhere to describe him, giving little color of my own to his strange missionary work. His end came in the semblance that one would expect from the country and the time: he was shot and mortally wounded while walking out of our garden. He was carried into the room that is our dining-room. And ever since that boisterous March morning, when Whitsun Harp was borne across our threshold, never does the wind rise that his ghostly bearers do not come again with their burden. Night, or morning, or noon, they pass through the wide gallery on soundless feet; their invisible fingers lift the latch; we see it rise; the door swings open; it swings back; they are in the room!

What do they do there? How can I know? They do not show; probably they go out again.

George Rose’s “ha’nt ” ought not to be mentioned in the same breath with ours,— an ignominious pretender, that capered and hooted and pounded on the Roses’ roof successfully enough to drive them out of the cabin and win a great name, and then had not the wit to keep hidden, when the planter explored its haunts, but let him shoot it for a foolish owl!

Our best spectre however, may pass muster anywhere. It is the shade of old R—— in his habit as he lived; and it patrols his buried treasure. The planter told me the following tale. “We used,” said he. “to have an old sailor on the estate, and one day, a little while after he came, he was out ploughing in the field just back of the old mansion, and I happened to come along. Says he, ‘Did anybody pass you?’ I answered. ‘No.’ ‘ Well,’ he said, ‘I saw a man.’ Something had happened to the double-tree of his plough, and he was bending over it, adjusting it. and when he looked up there was a man standing there, watching him; but his mules began to prance, frightened of a sudden, and he turned to soothe them, and when he looked again the man had gone. I asked him how the man was dressed. He said he was very well dressed, but he did n’t look like any of the people about here; he was an elderly man with a gray beard, wearing a white suit that looked just ironed, and a wide white straw hat, and he had a mighty pretty riding-whip in his hand. Well, there’s the strange part of it, — he described old R—exactly: and lots of people are sure it was the old fellow looking out for his money. I know the man never had heard the stories, and of course never had seen Colonel R——. It was the very place where they had hid the salt and the silver.”

Now, if any one is expecting an explanation of this apparition from the present writer, I beg that gentle reader to undeceive himself at once. I do not propose to cast slurs on the fair fame of our ghosts; and my own surmises shall be forever locked in my own breast.

To return, however, from this excursion into the night side of Nature, as Mrs. Crowe would say, to the Arkansas renter. The Arkansans are a mixed race, and their touch of Spanish and French ancestry has given a peculiar character to their physique. The native Arkansans commonly have olive skins, dark eyes, slender forms, and delicate features, like the Canadian habitants. Perhaps to their Spanish blood is due a grave imperturbability of demeanor that would not disgrace one of Cortez’s soldiers; and, no matter how low his worldly fortunes may fall, the Arkansan keeps a rude courtesy. He is a stoical soul. Indeed, one finds him too stoical. The keynote of his existence is a patient endurance of avoidable evils. The old story is to the point still: when it rains we can’t mend the roof, and when the sun shines the roof does not need mending.

As an illustration of plantation methods and the Arkansas character, we always remember our cowshed. The plantation carpenter being too busy with houses to condescend to cowsheds, we appealed to Thomas Jefferson Peps, who is indifferently carpenter, blacksmith, wood sawyer, butcher, or tinker, and between whiles makes a crop. Thomas Jefferson is amiability itself; he said that he would build a shed for us “jest too quick.”

The interview was on Thursday. Friday it rained. Saturday was “pigkilling day.” Sunday, of course, we could not expect him, but we were comforted to know that he was “studying ’bout ” us. Monday he appeared in person with a “helper,” — it always takes two men to do anything in the South, if it be no more than mending a fence, —and they looked at the yard and talked together for half an hour. Tuesday he came again, and carried off our best hatchet. Wednesday he really set to work, and worked steadily, effectively, and, according to plantation standards, rapidly, until the shed was complete save for doors. Then he was called away to make a coffin. He said, very justly, that cows could wait on him better than “co’pses,” and that as soon as he “got Gather Robinson’s coffin done he would fix our doors jest too quick.”

I trust that he was not two months making the coffin, but two months did we wait doorless; meanwhile, Albert nailed the cows in every night, and unnailed them every morning.

The shed is one experience; the smoky chimney with which the plantation talent wrestled for a whole winter is another. Each wrestler made it smoke a trifle worse. Finally the chimney was built over, —as it should have been in the first place, — and we triumphed !

There was— But why enumerate? We have learned a lesson worth all our besetments; we might have learned it from old Ben Franklin, for it was he — was it not? — who said, “If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.”

We came South three helpless women, accustomed to have men open the doors for us. One of us had a pretty conceit of her artistic cooking; and yet we were obliged to send for an old black woman to show our Northern cook — and us — how to make bread without compressed yeast. Now, thanks to Amy, our present waitress (from the North), we are accomplished paper hangers and house painters, and thanks to Christine, our cook (also from the North), we can spread whitewash artfully over our fences and outbuildings. Indeed, should need come (and Need, like a good neighbor, drops in without formality), we can show a variety of handicrafts. Constance is a good machinist, mending the broken locks and lamps; Madonna, who is the carpenter, makes beautiful furniture out of packing-boxes and cretonne. We are our own best glaziers, and once we built up a demoralized chimney with old bricks and an improvised mortar of sand and whitewash.

We are six miles, through the worst Swamp in Arkansas, from the nearest railway; nevertheless, the ox team goes two or three times a week to the station, we being but pusillanimous rustics who require ice and fresh beef, instead of slaying our own flocks and herds and cooling our milk and wines in a “wellhouse.”

You can live very well on a plantation if, as the negroes say, “you understand yourself.” Usually, there is plenty of game. In winter we eat our own mutton and beef; but when spring comes the beef cannot be kept, and we have the alternative of importing beef by express, or living on the diet of the country, pig, lamb, and fowl.

Pork is the principal article in the diet of the people, — fresh pork in winter, salt pork in summer. Every autumn there is a hog hunt down in the bottom, where the hogs run wild. The hunters camp out for a week, and return with hundreds of hogs.

Once, Constance and the writer rode to one of these hunts. It is a wild sport. The hogs look more like the boars that rend the dogs on Snyders’ canvases than the sleek black porkers of Berkshire. They are chased with dogs; and what with the shrill clamor of the horns, the baying of the hounds, and the shouts of the men, what with the mad gallop through the forest, leaping the logs, beating down the cane, dodging the flying lassos of vines and the spiked branches of thorn-trees, the sport sets the pulses jumping. Indeed, if you add its spice of peril (for the hogs fight, savagely), no sport in this country can rival it.

As I have said, pork is the dependence of the hungry Arkansan; but we keep flocks as well as herds, and kill lambs in the spring, while before the humblest cabin there is a cheerful cackling of fowls. Two dollars and a half a dozen we are expected to pay for “hens,” and seventy-five cents for a turkey. Eggs are ten cents a dozen. Meat, by which, in Arkansas, pork is always understood, rates from four to six cents a pound. Beef and mutton are only a cent or two higher.

The renter — at least our renter — has acquired a taste for flour, of late years, and flour is expensive compared with corn meal from his own corn, which he brings to the mill Saturday afternoons, and has ground for a primitive toll of a sixth of the meal. He has also taken to “store truck;” that is, canned vegetables, meats, and fruit. Did he choose, or rather did his wife choose, he could have a store of his own canned tomatoes, corn, and fruit. This is a wonderful country for vegetables: witness the hot-bed that Eustace made in the “way we does in Mississippi, ” and yet our sturdy lettuce and radishes are growing!

Three times a day the coffee-pot steams on an Arkansas “cook-stove. In passing, I may remark that poor indeed is the family in our country that does not have a cook-stove and a sewing-machine. Last year, the agent for an expensive range sold half a dozen eighty-dollar ranges to sundry farmers and renters (most of them black), while there is hardly a cabin so squalid that it has not a sixty or seventy-five dollar sewing-machine humming amid the beds and the children.

The coffee-pot and the frying-pan are sinners against the health of the people more inveterate and pernicious than the overflows or the damp air that are blamed for their ague. They cannot be charged at first hand with the other prevalent disease, pneumonia; but they aid and abet thin clothing and reckless exposure. A little prudence might save many lives, but prudence is not one of our virtues.

If he be not prudent, virtues of a different cast the Arkansas renter does possess. He has plenty of industry, although he may lack energy. He is brave, honest, hospitable as an Arab, and good-natured as an Irishman; and one feature of Arkansas character (for that matter, of Southern character) is the absence of the hungry and merciless curiosity as to the affairs of others that one notices so often in Northern rural communities.

Said good Jeremy Taylor: “Every man hath in his own life sins enough, in his own mind trouble enough, and in the performance of his offices failings more than enough, to entertain his own inquiry; so that curiosity after the affairs of others cannot be without envy and an evil mind.”Whatever our faults, we are not evil-minded. The white morality has, it must be admitted, a certain laxity as regards the family ties. Man and wife part easily, but they commonly observe the legal forms.

The Arkansas cracker has a shrewd sense of humor and plenty of imagination ; both of which qualities are crystallized in his dialect, just as his mingled French and Spanish descent is visible in our common words. “ Boydark ” (bois d’arc), a hedge, “bateau,” “pirogue,” “levee,” “cache it,” you may hear any day. A sort of rude poetry shows in such phrases as “mighty quick weather,” meaning uncertain weather; “burn the wind, ” to run fast; " r’arin’ and chargin’,” a synonym for furious anger; “can’t make a riffle (ripple), a metaphor to express utter worthlessness; or “light out ” for run away. The roads are “only muddy shoe mouth deep. ” Sometimes they are muddy enough “to mire a saddle blanket.” The grim humor of primitive life peeps out of other phrases.

“You owed the devil a debt.’ says a strange old proverb, “and he paid you in sons-in-law! ”

“Come to git a fire?” the hostess demands of a visitor making a brief stay, in hospitable sarcasm, alluding to old times when matches were rare, and a neighbor might run over to borrow a brand from the fireplace. To “bunch rags” is jocose for “to fight. ” “Got your name in the pot ” means that you are expected to a meal. I am told the same expression is current in those rural New England districts that the summer visitor has spared.

A pretty name for a child is the universal “little trick.” Naughty children are “given the bud ” or the “hickory ; ” sometimes they have the “hickory wrapped round ” them.

“I ain’t goin to marry a wife won’t work agin a cole collar, ” a man will say. He has in mind horses that will work only after they are warmed up by preliminary exercise.

A housewife says that her boiling water “ain’t kicking yet.” or is kicking, and certainly gives a very clear idea of a certain stage of ebullition. They shut up cattle “to gentle them.”

What could, express our good intentions better than the use of “aim” instead of “mean.” or our too great intimacy with the thief of time than our everlasting “fixing. ” to do ? “ Has Coot harnessed the horses? ” we ask. “No’m, he’s fixin’ to hitch ’em.” Or Thomas the unready, engaged days ago to putter for us, is the party of the second part. “Mr. Peps, I thought you were coming to mend our pump.” “Yes’m, fixin’ to do it light straight.”

“The all overs ” is a striking name for nervousness; and. somehow, “a fitified sheep ” seems more to be pitied than a sheep “liable to fits.” So “plumb ” is a more forcible adjective than “quite,” which has one meaning for the cultured, and an opposite intention for others.

“Triflin’ ” pictures a down-at-theheel morality even better than the New England “shiftlessness.” Besides, it. is more versatile. Not only our minds and habits, but our health, our looks, our weather, may be “triflin’.”

The dialect has in it the refraction of the life of the speakers; every figure borrowed from the forest and the brutes and the primitive arts tells the story. But a dialect is something more: it is the faithful custodian of the past.

You remember Sainte-Beuve’s definition: “Je define un patois une anciemie langue qui a eu des malheurs.” There is a curious kinship between the New England and the Southern dialects, plainly stamping their common origin. Take words like “fault ” used as a verb, or “delft ” for any sort of crockery, or “galluses ” (suspenders), or “tucking comb,” or “out” as a noun (“best out at preaching I ever heard”), or “unbeknown,” or “no great” of anything: they are as common as on the shores of Cape Cod. Other old words survive here that have faded out of New England speech. “Ben ” for “been ” is the old English form, and so is the construction “I ben” for “I was: ” you can find it on almost any page of Latimer’s or Ridley’s sermons. “I does plough. I did plough, I done ploughed, ” says an Arkansas darky, but so said reverend divines and scholars when America was discovered. Holp is the old English form of “help.” “Ax, says Bishop Latimer. for “ask.” " Worse and worser ” Ben Jonson did not scruple to write. Old people here still say “persever ” for “persevere.” In all the old English writers one reads of “ a great rich man and to this day it is a common expression. A “sparkle ” for a “spark,” we say, and, like our ancestors, we “put out a fire ” when we kindle it. They said “a power,” and “a heap, ” and “a great sort.” and “a chance ” of things, but I have not yet. encountered our most common phrase of multitude, “a right smart.” But they had the same use of “like.” and said “seemeth like ” when “as ” would be used by a modern grammarian; while we use “skipped out ” as seriously as Wyekliffe did when he wrote in his Bible, “Paul and Barnabas skipped out among the rabble.”

To one element in the Arkansas rustic’s composition I give a hearty respect, namely, his robust independence. He is no man’s inferior, and every black man’s superior. For this very reason, because he is so secure in his self-respect, he has not an atom of the naturalized American’s surly assertion; he does not “mutter in corners and grudge against the rich ” any more than he truckles to them; and he never presumes a hair’s breadth.

Our renters open their doors when we pass. Whatever the character of the occasion, be it wedding, or funeral, or neighborhood dance, one invariable formula is called to us: “Won’t you all come by? ” Yet their visits to us are a formal paying of their respects, as it were, once a year. The children come Saturdays to Constance’s sewingschool and Mrs. Planter’s Loyal Legion; the women attend the mothers’ meetings, which we try to make amusing with a faint suggestion of helpfulness: but that is all. When the planter, who is greatly beloved, fell sick, some years ago, several of the neighboring farmers would ride miles through the mud, every day, to inquire about him. It is no lack of interest; it is their untaught delicacy of feeling. “I ’lowed you all was right busy, so I did n’t come,” says the Arkansas cracker; or, “I ’lowed you all had a right smart of folkses to the house, so I kep’ away.”

The pivot on which a cotton plantation turns is the cotton gin. The mill is a versatile and obliging provider of comforts. It saws up our logs into lumber, saws our firewood, sharpens our tools, grinds our corn, and gins our cotton. The same dusky hands help in all cases. We do have a different man to saw and to gin, but it would be considered sinful waste to use a fresh crew for each new kind of work. Ginning goes on like clockwork; but sawing is as thrilling as a circus, with the frequent hazards and the agility of the performers. Twice in two days of sawing, this week, have I seen a black athlete save his skin by his nimble legs. “There ’s a nigger just missed of being killed,” said the leaper. with a grin.

The store is near the mill, on the river bank, with its gambrel roof shading the wide piazza, and conveniently covering the last convoy of groceries, or Shadrach Muzzle’s new stove, which is rapidly acquiring the fashionable terracotta tint. “ waiting on Shadrach.” In the rear, facing the village, is another piazza, even more likely to hold a mob of booted and soft - hatted loungers. The store is the social centre. It has more occupations than the mill, even, being the grocery, the milliner’s, the haberdasher’s, the chemist’s, the hardware store, the agricultural-implement depot, the gunsmith’s, the meat market. and the jeweler’s. It is also, on occasion, the temple of justice, and before the schoolhouse was built it was the church. It is the post office, of course. The post office is in the back part of the store, an unpretentious desk, the glass of the boxes decorated with announcements of the mail hours, estray notices, advertisements of any coming “concert” (which does not mean a musical entertainment, by any means; rather, reverting to the true definition of the word, it implies any amusement conducted in concert, usually the speaking of very moral little speeches, and the reading of very broadly humorous selections by the school-children), possibly intimations of church services and the sheriff’s coming to collect taxes, and the proclamation of reward for the arrest of two murderers, with their respective portraits adorning the broadside. Our present two, it is pleasant to know, have “ polished manners.” Every morning except Sunday, the mail rider rides up to the store door and remarks that the roads are “just terrible.” The head clerk, who is deputy postmaster, — the planter being the postmaster, — opens the mail, and reads the names of the owners of letters aloud. Next to the post office is the grocery, a little mixed, to be sure, with the crockery, and with a very choice assortment of tinware and colored glass, among which a few bright blue owl jugs are conspicuous. Opposite is the dry goods department, and overhead dangles the millinery shop, in boxes and out. The pharmacy has the advantage of a window, and is near the stove. Just across the aisle is the large shoe case that represents the stationer’s stand, the jeweler’s, and the haberdasher’s. At Christmas it is also the toy shop. Our jewelry is of the highest order of gilt plate and colored stones. On the left a door opens into another building, where great cypress blocks are the chief furniture of the meat market. Here the pigs and sheep and beeves are dealt out; here, too, are the saddles, the horse “gear,” the guns, the furniture, and the stoves. The shed adjoining holds ploughs, cotton planters, and stalk cutters, and there is a smoke-house for the hams.

“ Beneath that spreading oak the smithy stands.” accommodating jackat-all-trades, like the other buildings. A neat carpenter shop, a brickyard, the stables, the barns, the corn cribs, and the plantation boarding-house complete the list of public institutions on the river; but out in the fields, on the edge of the slash, stands the stanch little white schoolhouse, that is church and hall of entertainment as well, and has served the late Wheel and present Farmer’s Alliance for a meeting-room. Here, one winter, a literary society gathered weekly, to discuss such exciting questions as, Which is of more value, a horse or a cow ? or, Are political parties of more use or harm ?

The school-teacher is paid fifty dollars a month, which represents as high a respect for learning here as three times the amount does in richer localities.

Every Sunday, the Sunday school meets in the schoolhouse; and after school Constance or Mrs. Planter holds a brief service and reads a sermon, a very short one.

Christmas time brings the festivity of the year. On Christmas Eve a huge fir will blaze, and spatter wax over the new platform, and be covered with gifts for old and young. The walls will be decked with holly and mistletoe and the flaming swamp berries; and all the country round will gather. To me this Christmas time has an infinite pathos. There, on the edge of the wilderness, sullenly hiding who knows what secrets of carnage and woe, stands the little schoolhouse, with its cheerful windows, a flicker of human comradeship in the darkness.

The audience come in families, — on horseback, on muleback, in rattling farm wagons, with patchwork quilts for robes and overcoats. Some of the clothes may be ragged, but they will all be clean: very likely the housewife has robbed her sleep the night before to wash and mend.

I used to wonder what became of the unsuccessful adventures in fashions of head gear or wraps, but now I understand. Every year one observes a number of startling experiments: frocks of an extraordinary cut and florid color; bonnets and hats that have made a bold claim on public favor, but missed the mark. They wear I know not what of an air of conscious failure, and one sees them forlornly flaunting themselves in shop windows, appealing to their last hope, the feminine weakness for bargains, by large black figures on small white cards, with “Marked down to — ” above the figures. Then, not piecemeal, as would happen if a deluded public had fallen into the snare and carried them off, but suddenly, at a swoop, they disappear. Well, they have gone South! The planter meets them in St. Louis, —our contingent, that is, —and they are introduced to him as “an uncommonly cheap lot, in perfect condition.” In nine cases out of ten the “ uncommonly cheap lot ” follows him home on a freight train.

Thus we observe a fashion of our own. Last winter, all the women and children, black and white, blossomed out like a tulip bed with bright-hued toboggan caps, which they wore, defying age, looks, or weather, late into the spring. Half the petticoats of the plantation, another year, appeared in a “job lot” of striped cotton that had failed to impress the Northern fancy.

Christmas Eve, all our good clothes will come to the fore.

You, gentle reader, who have never really touched elbows with the poor, will smile over our grotesque finery. By the stove sits a man who, lacking a warm coat, has supplied its place with a quilt of many colors. But he is easy in his mind; does he not wear a shining new pair of rubber boots, and has not his wife new brass “ breastpin and ear - bobs ” ? And if our shoes are ragged, you will see very few ragged gowns; and there are many men in the splendor of white linen as stiff as flour starch can make it.

The children are so happy over their toys that it gives the beholder a softened pang. Watching them; knowing their narrow lives; picturing the cabin left behind in the lonely clearing, where the wind whistles through the broken windows, and, outside, the lean kine are vainly nibbling at the cotton stalks, I feel the weight of the immemorial tragedy on my holiday mood.

Not they: one boy is winding a Waterbury watch, and his whole being is flooded with content; another is quite as happy over a pair of rubber boots ; and little Johnnie Kargiss would not exchange that clumsy pocket knife for anything on the tree.

Besides the Christmas tree, other festivities have had the schoolhouse to thank. Here, on the teacher’s platform, was once erected an imposing red-paper fireplace, wherein burned a lantern behind red tinsel, giving a lifelike semblance of flame; and Box and Cox toasted their muffins and wrangled over their room, to the uproarious glee of a large audience. Mrs. Jarley’s Waxworks were wound up on the same platform. The Land of Nod was given by the school-children, and excited universal admiration. The question of costumes was solved in the briefest manner, by making them ourselves. We even manufactured shoes and armor; the latter out of pasteboard and tinfoil filched from tobacco packages at the store. We were somewhat appalled, however, at the discovery that eight little sleepy-heads, who should appear in the comely simplicity of nightgowns, must have costumes provided. The nightgown, it appeared, was an infrequent luxury. Fortunately, one little girl had several; so we managed, by borrowing, to fit out the crowd, — all but one little lad, and him we draped with a voluminous cheesecloth garment that had been made for an angel in a tableau. It was so long that he stumbled on it as he walked, and, being constructed solely with an eye to the view from the front, it opened behind, and had a trick of inflating and parting, giving his new blue jeans and red flannel shirt the appearance of being wafted along in a kind of broken balloon.

The planter on a plantation is expected to direct all undertakings of pleasure or profit. In most cases, he is postmaster, justice of the peace, free doctor, and matrimonial adviser for the neighborhood.

Such a scene as this is common: Scene, the store. Dramatis personae, the planter and Jeff Laughlin, whose wife has been dead full two months.

Laughlin. “Well, no, sir, I ain’t come for tradin’ to-day; I aimed to ask you’ advice.”

Polite but inarticulate murmur from planter, who goes on posting up his ledger.

Laughlin (whittling abstractedly on the rim of the desk). “Well, you see, my mother-in-law, she’s a mighty nice old lady, and she gits a pension of eight dollars a month, and spends ever’ cent on it fur the children; but, fact is, she’s so old and so nigh-sighted she jest natchelly cayn’t keep things up; and it ’s too hard for her, and it’s jest breaking her down. And I jest ’lowed I ’d ask you’ advice.”

Planter. “Well, Laughlin, I don’t see anything for it but for you to marry again! ”

Laughlin (brightening considerably). “Well, I don’t see anything else I kin do. I hate to terribly; but looks like I jest natchelly ben obleeged to.”

Planter. “Had you anybody in your mind, Laughlin?”

Laughlin. “I reckon Phonetta Rose would n’t have me? ”

Planter (with truthful frankness). “No, I don’t reckon she would.”

Laughlin. “I ’lowed she’d think I’d got too many children.”

Planter. “Yes, I dare say.”

Laughlin. “They ’re mighty nice, still children, and make a strong force for the cotton field.”

Planter. “They seem nice children. ”

Laughlin (very agitated). “I — I — say, Mist’ Planter, don’t you guess you could write a letter to Miss Phonetta, and ask her for me? ”

Planter. “Well, no, Mr. Laughlin. I don’t think she would take kindly to having any other man do her sweetheart’s courting. You speak up for yourself! ”

Laughlin (despondently). “Yes, sir, I 'll turn it over in my mind; but you see I ’d hate terrible for to have her say no to me right to my face, and twudn’t be nigh so bad in a letter. And I ain’t much in the habit of writin’ letters myself ” (which was strictly true, Laughlin being barely able to sign his name and “read writin’ ”),

“so I didn’t know but you,” etc.

Unlucky Laughlin! he has reached the boundary line of the planter’s amiability. “I won’t write love letters and I won’t pull teeth! ” declares the planter; and Laughlin goes his way to propose to Phonetta in form, on their way home from “playing games ” at a neighbor’s, to be rejected, and to feel ever afterward that if “Mist’ Planter ’d named it to her, instead, she ℉d of talked different.”

But we foresee that he will be consoled. In this country, widowers spend no long time in mourning. Six months are all that the most decorous would ask ; most widowers wait three months, two months, or only one. This haste does not imply hardness of heart so much as a hard life. What, indeed, shall a man do who has three or four little children, a big field waiting his hand outside, and no woman to guide things ?

The early marriages that are a most prolific source of poverty and unhappiness have a kindred excuse. “Well,” a young fellow says, “reckon I ’ll git married and make a crap! ” His wife works in the field with him. If he have children, they can help. Boys of seventeen, girls of sixteen, are married here continually.

The women have a hard life, working in the fields and in the house; they age early, and die when, under happier chances, they would be in their prime. Thus it happens that so many men have three, or four, or five wives “without,” as one honest fellow said, “never fighting with none of ’em.” “I kep’ ’em all decent, an’ I buried ’em all in a store coffin,” said he. An old planter, alluding to an unhealthy region, said, “Why, right down there I buried two or three wives, and four children, and a heap of niggers! ”

They are very fond of their children and kind to them ; unwisely kind, perhaps. as we Americans are inclined to be. To all the other hardships of a woman’s life here is added her mourning for her little children ; for the careless life bears hard on them, especially in overflow seasons. Sometimes we are reminded of this in a homely yet affecting way, as yesterday, when in buying some chickens and asking for more, the little merchant said : “They ain’t no more, only but one old rooster; and we don’t aim to sell him, ’cause my little brother that died, he always claimed him, and maw sayed she never would sell him ! ”

A queer expression (which is nevertheless a common one here), used by a poor mother whose little girl was burned to death, sticks in my memory: “It ben ten years, now, but I ain’t got satisfied with it yit.”

And a poor man, who clung desperately to a wretched mortgaged little farm in the swamp, excused himself for unwisdom that even he could see by the plea that his two dead children were buried there, and “My woman, she hated terribly to have them die, and she cayn’t git satisfied to leave ’em, nohow! ”

“What a life !” our Northern friends say. Yet it is a life with huge ameliorations. In this country, every one has the climate, to begin with. There are only two months in the year when we can be said to have cold weather; and even through those months are scattered lovely days of truce, filled with sunshine. Neither need we pay for our mild winters with hot summers. There are but two months that are really uncomfortably warm for more than a few days at a time. These are August and September. They tell us that the nights are cool then; but I receive this statement with a degree of apathy, because I never was in any climate so torrid that I did not hear it, or that two blankets did not make a handsome figure in the story. We sleep under two blankets, like the dwellers in St. Augustine, Nice, Algiers. and I dare say all the citizens of the equator that respect themselves.

But what a garden does this sombre plain show before spring is well over the threshold! The forest has not only the splendor of its innumerable vines and shrubs to deck it; there is all the sumptuous tinting of the trees; not only dogwood, redbud, buckeye, and bramble, but the brilliant sassafras-yellow, gorgeous tassels swinging above the cottonwood limbs, the rich velvet of oak and hickory, a golden flicker on the silver of the sycamores, fairy flames amid the swamp maples, and everywhere the delicate, fernlike cypress greenery.

When summer comes, our forest cloisters have a shade as dense and rich as the Black Forest. The poor man in this country, whatever he lacks, has air and space and beauty. He has, too, a rude plenty for his material wants. And is it not to be counted that one shall have the key to the fields; the right to live close to the grass, to miss the cankerfret of envy, the suffocation of merciless crowds, the sick despair of failure, and the untiring goad of fear?

Yes, we may weave our complacent plans to “elevate ” this people; but I question, Do they need our pity ? They are what Montaigne dubbed himself, “unpremeditated and accidental philosophers. ”

Neither need our kind friends of civilization pity our plight on “that forlorn plantation.” We are amazingly comfortable, thank you. For one thing, — but there are many things! — to win the best out of life, one must live at least part of the time in the country, I mean the real country; not the country of Watteau and fêtes, where nature is but a splendid canvas on which to paint fine toilets and field sports.

A plantation has all the simple charm of a farm without its loneliness. Here there is always a small ripple of human interest to watch, — like that picture from my window at this moment, for instance: a stalwart black fellow breaking a colt. To wake in the morning to the country sounds, a cock crowing lustily, a mocking-bird singing, the ring of an axe, the whistle of the little black boy driving the cows to pasture, the swash of the river waves, the soft stir of the wind in the cypress brake; at night, to watch the sunset burn out in the west, or the horsemen riding home with their bags of meal flung over their saddle-bow, or the herds winding along the woodland road, listening, at the same time, to the lowing of the cows and the bleat of the lambs, and now and again to a distant yodel or the boat song of Peps steering up a raft of logs, — here are simple pleasures, but they leave no sting.

Another thing that we enjoy is that we may be friends with the poor.

Perhaps it will be said that we may — and should — be friends with the poor everywhere. I will wager a basket of Arkansas roses against a handful of chips that the objector has not a single friend among the real poor. Do you call that woman with the six small children, who comes each morning for your skimmed milk, your friend; or the beneficiaries of your different most worthy societies, whom you barely know apart ? If you do, you deceive yourself, and the truth is not in you. Your friend is himself, by his own name and person, interesting to you; the skimmed-milk woman is only a poor creature to you, that you help because you are benevolent, and from whom you expect vast gratitude or little, according to your temperament, O you unconscious inspirer of anarchists!

But to know the poor as individuals, not as “ the poor, ” to be made free of their sorrows, to see their piteous little pleasures, to be friends, — that is different, that is to feel the eternal kinship. Bring your gift to a poor renter’s wedding, or go for a few minutes to his merry-making. — spring, when windows and doors are open, is the preferable time ; talk with him over your woodpile that he comes to chop, until you know all about the oldest girl, who “kin jest take up a book and read right spang off,— don’t have to stop to spell nary, ”—and the baby, “the smartest little trick you ever did see;” sit all night in the draughts of his cabin watching a dying child (nothing like such an experience to fetch the necessity for comfortable houses for your tenants home to your conscience!) ; and when the importunity of death to spare has failed, learn how alike are all mothers’ hearts in their desolation,— and you will comprehend the difference. Such an intercourse brings a feeling that is nearer and more human than could come of years of perfunctory interest as a “kind lady.”

To these people we are only their good neighbors.; more generous — not more kind—than other neighbors, simply because we have more to give. They are attached to us as “mighty nice, pleasant, ’bliging folks.” They feel no wound to their pride in accepting favors that they would return were it in their power; indeed, do return in other shapes. Surely, in this day and generation, when Samson strains at the pillars of the temple, it is a thing worth counting, this wholesome and gentle relation.

For myself, I count. it a further mercy that we live among a people so honest, kindly, and unhasty. It is a rest to be out of the nineteenth century for a while, with people who will not hurry for money, who believe in Jonah and the whale (all the more stanchly that they have but the dimmest notion what a whale is), and consider theft worse than murder.

Soon it will all be changed. Already the shadow creeps over the dial. Just as the ugly, comfortable new houses are replacing the picturesque old cabins, as the “heater ” stove is crowding out the fireplace, so the new ways will push the old aside. The school-children do not talk dialect; only the old people are willing to plant corn by hand.

Some day a railway station will be the magnet for the loungers instead of the store, or — oh, heavy thought! — there will be no more loungers. We shall all be civilized into stirringPhilistines. with no time to waste in friendly gossip; farms will be tilled by tenants who expect to make money as well as a livelihood, and could not shoot a wild turkey to save their lives; the saw will buzz away our grand old forests that have sheltered the moundbuilders ; we shall become a syndicate, or a corporation, or a trust: and the country will be so well drained that it cannot even summon an old-time chill over its changed conditions.

Yes, the new civilization will come. I am enough a child of my age to feel that it is best it should come, but I am glad to be here before it comes. I hope that it may not come too fast!