It is a delicate cane and very slow in its growth, requiring many cleanings before it covers the ground, and seldom takes a start until the fall of the year. It furnishes a scanty supply of dry leaves to cover the land and keep it cool. It gives a smaller proportion of tops to supply the cattle pens with feeding and to make manure, and it suffers more from trespass. It gives a smaller proportion of fuel compared to the other canes, and in every sense of the word, it is not, in these bad times, so good a poor man's cane as the Montblanc and blue canes and black transparent canes. From the prejudices that formerly existed against the colored canes, they have been planted on light sandy soils and in galls, in which the Bourbon cane could not long exist. But if these inferior canes were planted in your best lands, well manured, I am convinced they would, on an average of five or seven years, pay better than the Bourbon cane, and would, in this given period, in plants and ratoons, make as much sugar at nearly one-half of the expense. For example, they grow rapidly and cover the ground quickly, they throw a great quantity of dry trash on the ground, and have a large bushy top that affords ample shade for the roots. Comparatively speaking, they require very little weeding and trashing; they give ample protection to the land, by a deep cover of trash; they suffer less from the trespass of stock, hogs and rats, and the people do not eat them as they do the Bourbon cane. They give a great quantity of feeding for stock and supply for the cattle-pens, and a larger quantity of trash from the mill than is necessary for fuel to manufacture the sugar. The overplus is a valuable ingredient for making manure, which may be fermented in cattle-pens, or in pits where it may receive dundar. The drainings of the stable and cattle-pens, the refuse of skimmings, the washings of cisterns, and all the sweepings and cleanings about the works may be added, and ashes, &c. The white or Montblanc cane, comes next in quality to the Bourbon, and may be successfully planted in the same piece, say every alternate row or two of Bourbon, and one of white cane. By this mixture, the extra trash from the latter assists in making up the deficiencies of the former. The white and other colored canes suffer less from drought and poverty of soil, and ratoon better and much longer than the Bourbon cane, as they do not empoverish the land, but tend to improve it with proper culture. A great deal more may be said in carrying out these leading principles into practical detail, but they are too numerous for this paper. 3. COTTON BLOOMS, FROSTS AND CROPS. The subjoined table will be read with curiosity, if not with profit, by our planting friends. It shows the date of bloom and frost, with the crop of each season, from 1836 to date: Dute of bloom. 4th June. Date of frost. 14th October. 27th October. 7th October. 15th October. 1836, 17th October. 1848, 1519, 30th May. 20th November. 10th December. 15th October. Extent of стор. 1.432.000 bales. 1,800.000 1,360.000 66 *2.700.000 2,000,000 66 15th June. Taking the above as a criterion, we may as well prepare for a short crop. In Central Georgia there are no blooms yet, and no prospect of any before the 18th to the 24th of June. Judging from this, we are destined to have another short crop. True there has been more ground planted than usual; but, in many seetions, immense tracts of rich cotton lands, which last year were cultivated, are under water, and cannot be planted this season. 4. SUGAR AND ITS USES. The French people are great eaters of sugar, always carrying some of it about with them, in their pockets and reticules, and, generally, putting five or six lumps into each cup of coffee. M. Chessat reports that sugar, when used as the exclusive, or principal article of diet, produces quite opposite effects in persons, according to the difference in their systems; for, while it fattens some, it creates bile, which induces a diarrhea, and a wasting of the solids, in other persons. The celebrated Bolivar had, by fatigue and privations, so injured the tone of his stomach, that he was unable, at times, to take any other food than sugar, which, in his case, was easy of digestion. His personal friends assure us, that, in some of his last campaigns, he lived, for weeks together, upon sugar alone, as a solid, with pure water as a liquid; but, probably, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, this diet would soon have brought the person adopting it to his grave; for, on those whose digestion is feeble, a large, or exclusive, allowance of sugar adds to their grievance, because the excess of nutriment, not being generally absorbed by their weakened system, becomes converted to bile, and causes great debility and wasting of the body. In seventeen experiments, made on dogs, M. Chessat observed, that, when the sugar diet fattened them, there was a general tendency to constipation meanwhile; and, on the contrary, when it produced an excess of bile in other dogs, their bowels were relaxed. Why English children suffer, in their digestion, after eating largely of sugarplums, comfits, &c., is chiefly owing, however, to tho e delicacies being composed of the refuse of starch works, mixed with plaster of Paris, pipe clay and chalk, and having, indeed, as little sugar as will suffice to give them a palatable sweetness; and they are often colored with gamboge; and, sometimes, with red lead, verdigris, and other mineral poisons. Everywhere, the beasts of the field, the reptiles, the fish and insects, are found to have a great liking for sugar and honey. Mr. Martin says he has tamed the most savage and vicious horses with sugar, and has seen the most ferocious animals domesticated by being partly fed upon it. The tamers of lions and tigers owe their power over them chiefly to a judicious use of sugar, and other sorts of sweets, and, also, of lavender water, and various other perfumes, of which feline animals are remarkably fond. In the sugar season, in the West Indies, the horses, mules and cattle, soon acquire a plumpness and strength by partaking of the leaving of the sugar canes, after the manufacturer has done with them. In Cochin-China, the elephants, buffaloes and horses, are all fattened with sugar. We learn, from the "Memoirs of Dr. Edw. Dartwright (143), that this ingenious man used to fatten sheep on sugar. To birds, this diet proved so nourishing, that the suppliers of the European poultry markets find that sugar, along with hemp seed and boiled wheat, will greatly fatten ruffs and reeves in the space of a fortnight. 5. ROSES. The rose, in all countries, and in all times, has been held as the queen of flowers. The name, as it comes to us, is from the Greek rodon; it has relation to the color, red. The Greeks took their impression of the rose, and all matters of taste in the vegetable kingdom, from the Egyptians, Persians, and other nations of Asia. Everywhere it is the type of beauty and love. The Greeks had more taste than imagination, and they found, in their beautiful fable, the luxuriant growth of Oriental fancy. They have this tradition. The god of Love made a present to Harpocrates, the god of Silence, of a beautiful rose, the first that had been known, to engage him not to discover any of the secrets of his mother, Venus; and hence it has become a custom to have a rose placed in their rooms of mirth and entertainment, that, under the assurance thereof, they might lay aside all restraint, and speak what they pleased. Thus did the rose become a symbol of silence, and sub rosa, under the rose, denote as much as to be out of danger of any disclosure. In India, and other portions of the East, the rose was commingled with sentiment and song. Its beauty and its perfume made it, in their imaginations, a match for the sweetest of nature's music, and hence the nightingale was married to the rose. Flowers are delightful to all. The tasteful Athenians, who had a market for the sale of them, were obliged to pass sumptuary laws to restrain the extravagance of purchasers. Such was the passion over every mind in the East for flowers, that from them has been made a universal language of friendship, affection and love. It is one of no difficult acquirement, and fragments have been diffused far and wide. Roses are ornaments of the altar of hymen, while vases of lilies are placed upon the grave of youth and innocence.-Samuel L. Knapp. 6. HOUSES FOR NEGROES. One of the most prolific sources of disease among negroes, is the condition of their houses and the manner in which they live. Small, low, tight and filthy, their houses can be but laboratories of disease; whilst on every side grow rancorous weeds and grass, interspersed with fruit trees, little patches of vegetables and fowl-houses effectually shading the ground, and preventing that free circulation of air so essential to the enjoyment of health in a quarter. Your correspondent has frequently detected the presence of worms, and sometimes in large numbers in negroes inhabiting houses thus conditioned and situated; so often, indeed, that he almost regarded their existence "as a matter of course." Nothing can be so deteriorating to the blood, and consequently to the secretions, as bad air. To be convinced of the truth of this assertion, your readers need but to refer to the "Reports of the Board of Health," in the nearest close-built and ill-ventilated cities and towns, and to the "sick lists" of hospitals, jails and ships. That fatal form of febrile disease, denominated ship fever," though, to some extent, modified, has occurred repeatedly in negro houses. Not to contend for, in all probability, an admitted point, then, it may be concluded that it is important that planters should adopt some system or rule under the operation of which their negro houses shall be properly constructed, their quarters adequately ventilated and dried, and the manner of living among their negroes regulated. It is a common custom with negroes to return in the evening from the field tired, and often in a perspiration, and lie down before their doors upon a board or bench and sleep till nine or ten o'clock, while the dew is falling and the atino-phere becomes cool and damp; instead of going into their houses and either lying down in bed or before a gentle fire, where the exhalation from the skin would be more gradual, and that chilliness consequent upon their sudden "cooling" would be avoided. Let planters go at this hour around their quarters, and feel the hands and feet of negroes thus conducting themselves, and they will no longer be in doubt as to the source of their "chills and fevers." Now, it is not the wish of your correspondent to interfere with the household and domestic arra gements and affairs of negroes, nor to destroy their gardens and patches-to allow them which is all very proper-but when they will not have an eye to health," themselves, it is to the interest of their owners to have an eye for them.-Suthern Cultivator. 7. SOUTHERN NEGRO LIFE. In this age of canting abolitionism and pseudo philanthropy, we have thought the following sketch from the pen of W. Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, worthy of preservation. The pictures, as far as they go, are painted by him true to life, and are only what we have all witnessed a thousand times over. Apropos too, this subject of southern negro poetry and song is a curious one and deserving of study, constituting as it does the literature, and indeed, the very ingenious literature, of that people. Several years ago, Judge Meek, of Alabama, contributed to one of the southern magazines several interesting papers upon the subject, interspersed with not a few specimens. Some day, at our leisure, we shall hunt them up. TOBACCO FACTORY AT RICHMOND. "I went afterward to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me, though the narcotic fume made me cough. In one room a black man was taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of tobacco is composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting the leaves according to the quality, and others again were arranging the leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice. In another room about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the age of twelve years up to man hood, who receive the leaves thus prepared, rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and thus became ready for market. As we entered the room we heard a murmur of psalmody running through the assembly, which now and then swelled into a strain of very tolerable music. "Verse sweetens toil-' says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so fond of quoting, and really it is so good that I will transcribe the whole of it: "Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound- "Verse, it seems, can sweeten the toil of slaves in a tobacco factory. "We encourage their singing as much as we can,' said the brother of the proprietor, himself a diligent masticator of the weed, who attended us, and politely explained to us the process of making plug tobacco; we encourage it as much as we can, for the boys work better while singing. Sometimes they will sing all day long with great spirit; at other times you will not hear a single note. They must sing wholly of their own accord, it is of no use to bid them to do it.' "What is remarkable,' he continued, their tunes are all psalm tunes, and the words are from hymn books; their taste is exclusively for sacred music; they will sing nothing else. Almost all these persons are church members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so. Most of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists.'" A CORN SHUCKING. "But you must hear of the corn shucking. The one at which I was present, was given on purpose that I might witness the humours of the Carolina negroes, A huge fire of light wood was made near the corn-house. Light wood is the wood of the long-leaved pine, and is so called, not because it is light, for it is almost the heaviest wood in the world, but because it gives more light than other fuel. In clearing land, the pines are girdled and suffered to stand; the outer portion of the wood decays and falls off, the inner part, which is saturated with turpentine, remains upright for years, and constitutes the planter's provision of fuel. When a supply is wanted, one of these dead trunks is felled by the ax. The abundance of light wood is one of the boasts of South Carolina. Wherever you are, if you happen to be chilly, you may have a fire extempore; a bit of light wood and a coal give you a bright blaze and a strong heat in an instant. The negroes make fires of it in the fields where they work; and, when the mornings are wet and chilly, in the pens where they are milking the cows. At a plantation where I passed a frosty night, I saw fires in a small inclosure, and was told by the lady of the house that she had ordered them to be made to warm the cattle. "The light wood fire was made, and the negroes dropped in from the neighboring plantations, singing as they came. The driver of the plantation, a colored man, brought out baskets of coru in the husk, and piled it in a heap; and the negroes began to strip the husks from the ears, singing with great glee as they worked, keeping time to the music, and now and then throwing in a joke and an extravagant burst of laughter. The songs were generally of a comic character; but one of them was set to a singularly wild and plaintive air, which some of our musicians would do well to reduce to notation. These are the words: Johnny come down de hollow. Johnny come down de hollow. De nigger-trader got he. De speculator bought ine. I'm sold for silver dollars. Boys, go catch the poney. "The song of 'Jenny gone Away,' was also given, and another, called the monkey-song, probably of African origin, in which the principal singer personated a monkey, with all sorts of odd gesticulations, and the other negroes bore part in the chorus, ‘Dan, dan, who is the dandy? One of the songs, commonly sung on these occasions, represents the various animals of the woods as belonging to some profession or trade for example: 'De cooter is de boatman-' The cooter is the terrapin, and a very expert boatman he is. 'De cooter is de boatman. John, John Crow. De red-bird de soger. John, John Crow. De mocking bird de lawyer. "The alligator's back is furnished with a toothed ridge, like the edge of a saw, which explains the last line. "When the work of the evening was over, the negroes adjourned to a spacious kitchen. One of them took his place as musician, whistling and beating time with two sticks upon the floor. Several of the men came forward and executed various dances, capering, prancing and drumming with heel and toe upon the floor with astonishing agility and perseverance, though all of them had performed their daily tasks and had worked all the evening, and some had walked from four to seven miles to attend the corn shucking. From the dances a transition was made to a mock military parade, a sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which the words of command and the evolutions were extremely ludicrous. It became necessary for the commander to make a speech, and confessing his incapacity for public speaking, he called upon a huge black man named Toby, to address the company in his stead. Toby, a man of powerful frame, six feet high, his face ornamented with a beard of fashionable cut, had hitherto stood leaning against the wall, looking upon the frolic with an air of superiority. He consented, came forward, and demanded a bit of paper to hold in his hand, and harrangued the soldiery. It was evident that Toby had listened to stump speeches in his day. He spoke of de majority of Sous Carolina,''de interests of de State,'' de honor of ole Barnwell district,' and these phrases he connected by various expletives and sounds, of which we could make nothing. At length he began to falter, when the captain, with admirable presence of mind, caine to his relief, and interrupted and closed the harrangue with an hurrah from the company. Toby was allowed by all the spectators, black and white, to have made an excellent speech." DEPARTMENT OF MANUFACTURES. 1. CHARLESTON COTTON MILLS. At a late meeting of the stockholders the following officers were elected for 1850: James Chapman President. Directors: J. H. Taylor, J. Welsman, J. Provost, Henry Cobia. We passed an hour very pleasantly on Saturday afternoon in an examination of the flourishing establishment in the upper part of the city, known as the steam cotton mill. We have watched the progress of this enterprise with great interest, because we regard it somewhat in the light of an experiment. An experiment not merely to determine whether cotton could be profitably converted into cloth in our city, but an experiment upon the industrial habits of our people. It has often been asserted of southern industry, that it was not persistent or enduring; that our climate was enervating, and productive of lassitude, indolence and feebleness; and that if cotton mills were started they could not be carried on by southern operatives, and that therefore they would have to be imported from the North. Again, it was urged that the business was one unsuited to our tastes and pursuits, and could not successfully be introduced |