negro will often only drive them from his own part of the crop into that of the neighbouring squad. As for fences in general, they are allowed without remorse to go to wreck. The planter, by a considerable extra expenditure on special labour every year, may contrive to keep them up; but where he fails in so doing, the fences go from bad to worse, till the plantation is in danger of being deeply embarrassed or of sinking altogether. The money required to fence a plantation is considerable, and many fine tracts of land have not yet recovered the total destruction of fences with which they were visited during the war. A staff of white mechanics and special outdoor labourers would be necessary to secure to the negro such a share of the crop as would keep him easy and affluent. The only alternative of the share system is payment by time wages, and under this arrangement every squad of negro labourers would require an overseer to keep them steadily at work, and get the value of the wages out of them. Otherwise, it is believed, the wages plan would be less profitable even than the share system. The best and most willing negroes seem to have little self-reliance, and never work so well as when they have a white man at their right hand to show them how to do it.

Old Mr. Gordon established his head-quarters at Pontotoc, a little county-town some twenty miles north-east from Okolona, where the Federal Government had its first office for the sale of lands in this State; and there, on a site which had been the residence of the Indian Queen, built a stately mansion of timber sawn from the pine forest by hand. There were no steam sawmills in the country at that time, and it took three years to build the future house of this branch of the Gordons. It is a plain but spacious mansion of fourteen rooms, all very large, and having large cellars stored with the juice of "the hanging grape -which, here abounding, gave its name in the days of the Red men to the country round-and stables and offices, garden and vineyard, and a burying-ground near by under a spreading red elm sacred to family remains. There is a Scotch style about all which strikes every visitor. Mr. Gordon was noted for hospitality, and the son in this respect is worthy of the sire. There is a large orchard free to all who choose to gather its luscious fruit, and a pack of foxhounds, the best in the United States, that lead many a "tally-ho!" over wide plains and through forest tracks where the war-whoop of the Indian rose on the midnight blast in former times. The Colonel is an enthusiastic sportsman. The walls of his shooting-box are covered with the skins of bears, panthers, wild cats, and other feræ naturæ of the prodigious sort, the trophies of hunting expeditions on his plantation in the Mississippi bottom. The glossy plumage of wild fowl serves to soften somewhat these barbarous elements, and

huge deer antlers, while adding to the ornament of the cottage, form useful resting-places for guns and fire-arms of almost every pattern and device. As if hunting bears and panthers in the cane-brakes of the Mississippi were not enough, I have found the Colonel meditating, well satisfied with the improved working of his plantation, a trip to South Africa, where a Gordon Cumming and a Chaillu have made themselves famous, and in gorillas and other monsters of the wilderness have discovered subjects of sport worth writing about. Old Mr. Gordon gave his seat at Pontotoc the name of "Lochinvar," in memory of the ancient seat of the Gordons, on the Solway, famed in song and story. The same veteran settler of Mississippi founded the town of Aberdeen, several miles south from Okolona, with a branch road from the Mobile and Ohio. Mr. Gordon would have called this place Dundee, but a neighbour, meeting him one morning, said, "Wall, Mr. Gordon, I believe you are to call this city Dundy.'" "No, I am not," said the offended Scotsman, who saw at once that the pronunciation of Dundee would not transplant to American soil, and so he gave the more northern city the honour of a Transatlantic namesake. Aberdeen is a thriving town of four or five thousand people, and on Saturday-a market day—was astir with country people, hitching up their horses and buggies, buying and selling, and taking general possession of the stores and their contents.

One is struck by the number of active young men who have applied themselves manfully to the cultivation of the farms in this section of the country. They move about in work-day attire over long distances, and display a confident and hopeful spirit. But they say that 15 cents per lb. for cotton is necessary to pay the expenses of cultivation as affairs are at present manageable. The war is seldom spoken of, and sympathy for the traces of it, everywhere visible in amputated arms and limbs, may sometimes be carried beyond due bounds. Southern gentlemen have a singular habit of wearing their coats without putting their arms in the sleeves. I have caught myself several times in a full flow of tender feeling for the gallant fellows who had lost both arms in the war, when it soon after became clear that the generous emotion was wholly misspent and thrown away.

CHAPTER XXII.

Stoppage on the Railway." Doctoring" the Engine.-A Word of Advice to Railway Companies.-The Town of Meridian.-Supposed traces of Coal. -The "Ku-Klux-Klan "-its Rise, Progress, and Decline.-Difficulty of finding Teachers of Negro Schools.

[MERIDIAN, MISS.-Jan. 11-13.]

I ARRIVED at Meridian on Sunday morning at half-past four, albeit the train that brought us was due shortly after midnight. The fact is that, the night being somewhat frosty, the engine took a fit of wheezing, and finally stood still, two hours or more, in the woods about thirty miles north from this point. The scene, I admit, was very charming. The track ran along an embankment of moderate elevation, from which the land, on one side, rose in gentle ridges of Indian corn-stalks, and spread away, on the other, in a plain of woodland, thinned, grassy, and ornamental as a park. The moonlight was clear almost as noonday, and made the lamps in the cars blink like dissipated owls. When an hour or two had passed in this delightfully sequestered spot, a vague desire to embrace the shadows of the trees, and follow the unknown but all the more attractive meanderings of the brooks, stole over both mind and body. So a few of us stepped out on to the embankment. The head of the train was a long way ahead, and getting down on a railway track in moonlight scatters a vast amount of imagination and romance. The engine was obviously in a bad way. There was a large escape of steam from the valves, and the engineers had apparently cut several of her ribs out, and laid them along the track, and were now labouring to knock her shoulder-blade out of joint. The swearing at the same time was terrible, and I was glad to stride away from the natural beauties of the situation to my seat under the blinking owls, reflecting mainly on all the British army once did in Flanders. There is a peculiarity, by the way, in much of the swearing in this part of the world which one notes. The whole practice is everywhere abominable, but an emphatic oath under strong passion may command passing respect by its thunder, and, whether or not, immediately apologizes by the fact that it is not to be repeated; whereas a long and never-ending drawl of

profane interpolations, running not only into words but syllables of words, as if the sacred name could not in sufficient contempt be cut into too many pieces, is more revolting than impressive, and as weak as it is utterly inexcusable. Fortunately, the great majority of those who are doomed to hear do not understand a word of it, and for my part I have been always glad to conclude that it is a form of patois which the poor devils who utter it do not understand themselves. How our engine on this occasion got into working order I am unable to explain, but its exploits thus far have been singular. When once fairly in breath, it seemed to get on very well at a rate of five to seven miles an hour; but at the stoppages, which were numerous, the process of re-inflation exceeded the due licence even of a Highland bagpipe, and, besides the usual droning and snorting of that delicious instrument, consisted in a saltatory movement backward and forward, as if the train had to leap a series of five-bar gates one way and to releap them all over again the other, before getting under weigh at its normal and regulation trot. The Mobile and Ohio Railroad is just now choked with cotton bales; the freight trains, one a day, are long and heavy, and the rolling stock inadequate to the occasion; but at a time when the vital struggle of the Southern seaports is to hold a place against the great steam-power suction towards New York, it must surely be worth consideration whether a thorough renewal of their existing lines of inland traffic be not paramount even to new schemes. The Memphis and Charleston, and the Mobile and Ohio, are equally splendid lines of communication. They are being crossed by other lines at various points to their detriment, but their original sweep and convenience of transit remain intact, and yet they are languishing and, to the stockholders, unproductive affairs. It is the part of Charleston and Mobile to consider and be wise. The great advance of the port of Savannah is largely to be ascribed to the ability and vigour with which the old inland lines of Georgia have been conducted, and the judgment with which their connections have been extended far and wide into other States.

Meridian is a lump of a town, sprawling over sandy mounds in a wide open bosom of the forest. The tufty foliage of the yellow pines, covering the ridges, forms the chief ornament of the place. But the town is growing up rapidly, and several large brick warehouses have been recently erected on lines intended to be developed one day into streets. A long row of stores faces the railway, with ample space between for all manner of open-air business. Meridian is the terminus of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad; and the Mobile and Ohio and the Vicksburg and Montgomery lines also cross at this point. The construction of the Alabama and Chattanooga, which was pushed on from

Meridian under a superintendent, while Mr. Stanton was busy urging forward the work from the other end, naturally brought a deal of labour, money, and traffic about the little town, and helped it over its early stages. The negro population is numerous, and much of the storekeeping business is conducted by sharp, active young men of Jewish aspect, who talk German-English, and make no secret of their little bill transactions on cotton

liens at the rate of 40 per cent. per annum. These people are sent down by firms in New York and other large towns to sell goods at a profit of 100 to 200 per cent. to the more impoverished class of planters, and to advance money on cotton at the approach of the picking season at as much interest as they can extort. One firm in New York is said to make half a million of dollars in this lucrative business per annum, after giving, it may be supposed, a fair share of the spoils to the Hebrew agents, who live on the spot, and bear the heat and burden of the day. About 100,000 bales of cotton are annually passed on from this point, where so many railways meet. The Alabama and Chattanooga, though not completed and opened to through traffic, is working as far into the Alabama interior as Eutaw, and passes at this end through Sumpter and Green counties, and other rich cotton districts of the Alabama "prairie" land.

I went out several miles with the superintendent of the Alabama and Chattanooga Company here to see mineral traces supposed to be coal, and found them to be thin chips of lignite exposed by a little superficial digging across the bed of a rill trickling down a depression betwixt the deep pine-clad ravines which characterize this locality. Having fallen on the welldeveloped seams of coal and iron at the northern end of the Alabama and Chattanooga Railroad, I have felt some curiosity in marking the characteristics of the country at its southern extremity; but though this line passes direct through wellknown mineral fields of Alabama over a large portion of its course, yet the aspect of the country down here in Mississippi differs entirely from the neighbourhood of Lookout Mountain, and the northern interior of the intervening State. The highest elevations are simply heaps of sand, clay, and drift. The ravines are of immense depth, and I have not been at the bottom of the lowest of them; but, in the beds of the creeks we had to cross, no trace of rock was to be seen, and the lazy waters moved over the same sandy slime as was found on the tops of the highest mounds. As one nears the Gulf the rocky strata seem to lie deep out of sight; and lignite and shaly deposits, while highly interesting in a scientific point of view, as showing in embryo how the great coal-beds were formed, do not promise much commercial result. In this same district copperas has been found, and was wrought to some extent for dyeing purposes during the war.