libraries, and nearly four times as many seats
for church-goers. The keep of a negro in
Natchez is reckoned at eight dollars a month;
for, in or near town, extras are granted him.
On the plantations a negro costs less, his usual
weekly allowance being a peck of meal and
three pounds of bacon.

After a thirty miles' ride out of Natchez, Mr.
Olmsted called at a house and was denied
lodging. It was two miles and a half to the
next house. That was deserted. After several
miles' more riding, when it was growing dark
and gathering for rain, a house was found at
which every request for shelter and plea of
fatigue in horse and man was met by a surly
No; there was not even concession of a few
words of direction to another place of rest.
Presently afterwards the road passed another
house where there was a man fiddling in the
gallery.

"Could you accommodate me here to-night,
sir?" asked the weary traveller.

The man called through an open door to
somebody within, "Wants to know if you can
accommodate, him?"

"With what?" grated a woman's voice from
inside.

"With a bed, of course," said the fiddler;
"what do you suppose? He! he! he!"

No further attention was vouchsafed; Darkness
and rain came on. A negro boy was met,
who said that it was two miles to the next
house, but he did not reckon the traveller would
get in there.

"How far, then, to the next house beyond
that?"

"About four miles, sir, and I reckon you can
get in there, master; I've heerd they did take
in travellers."

But in the darkness the wayfarer lost his
road and came across country, after a couple of
hours' wandering, to a large negro settlement,
where the overseer and his wife not only took
him in, but gave up to him their own bedroom,
garnished with pistols and other arms, rolls of
negro-cloth, shoes and hats, handcuffs, a large
medicine-chest, and several books on medicine,
surgery, and farriery, with quack medicine
placards stuck on the walls in place of pictures.

This was the chamber ot the overseer of a
first-rate plantation. On its highest ground
there was to be seen next morning the handsome
mansion of the owner, by whom it had not been
occupied for several years. There were a
hundred and thirty-five slaves big and little, with a
nursery for sucklings: to which at that time
twenty women, each expected to do only a half
day's work, went four times a day for half an
hour each time, to nurse their babies.

The niggers here, said the overseer, did not
very often run away, because they were almost
sure to be caught. As soon as he saw that one
was gone, he put the dogs on, and if rain had
not just fallen they would soon find him. Riding
over the ground with the friendly overseer, the
tourist found thirty or forty ploughs moving
together, and from thirty to forty hoers, chiefly
women, with a black driver walking about among
them with a whip, which he often cracked at
them, sometimes allowing the lash to fall lightly
on their shoulders. He was constantly urging
them also with his voice. Not one dared raise
her eyes to look at the stranger.

Of the negroes' lives here, this was the
outline given by their overseer. They eat " their
snacks" in their cabins before coming out to
work, and they come out as soon as it is
daylight. At twelve, the dinner-carts come, and the
hoe gang eats in the field, only stopping work
long enough to eat it, but the plough gang has
advantage in its share of the rest thought necessary
for cattle, though denied to women. The
mules have a two hours' rest and feed, during
which the plough gang dine at leisure. All work
till they can no longer see to work properly, and
there is no more food or rest for anybody till
the return at dusk into the cabins. This would
give in the summer sixteen hours a day of plodding
labour, broken only by one hurried interval
of food and rest for the hoe gang, consisting
chiefly of women. "I was accustomed," says
Mr. Olmsted, " to rise early and ride late, resting
during the heat of the day, while in the
cotton district; but I always found the negroes
in the field when I first looked out, and
generally had to wait for the negroes to come from
the field to have my horse fed when I stopped
for the night." At half-past nine o'clock a horn
is blown, and at ten the huts are visited, in
order to make sure that no slave wastes his
strength by taking pleasure in the place of sleep.
Washing, patching, wood-hauling and cutting
for the cooking fires, grinding of com, and
cultivation of the bit of soil on which each negro
may grow greenstuff and keep poultry of his
own, has to bedone out of work hours; and on
this plantation the whole of Saturday after eight
in the morning, as well as Sunday, is given to
the slave for work of his own, by which he may
earn for himself little additions to his worldly
means. Every family on the plantation gets
also from the owner at Christmas, a barrel of
molasses, with some coffee, tobacco, calico, and
Sunday tricks.

"The man who owns this plantation,"
explained the overseer, " does more for his niggers
than any other man I know."

This overseer had been in his place ten years,
though the custom on plantations in these
parts was to change overseers every year, on
the principle that "the two years' service system
is sure to spoil them." Some, remain four or
five years; but the average time of an overseer's
service on the same plantation does not exceed
two years. Overseers' wages are from two to
six hundred dollars; but " a real driving overseer,"
said an Alabama man, " would very often
get a thousand. He heard of two thousand
being paid one fellow. A real devil of an overseer
would get almost any wages he'd ask;
because, when it was told all round, that 'such a
man had made so many bales to the hand,' everybody
would be trying to get him." The credit
of the overseer depends solely upon the quantity