Twelve miles his plantation used to
run,--a regular barony. It is nearly all gone now; only strag-
gling bits belong to the family, and the rest has passed to
Jews and Negroes. Even the bits which are left are heavily
mortgaged, and, like the rest of the land, tilled by tenants.
Here is one of them now,--a tall brown man, a hard worker
and a hard drinker, illiterate, but versed in farmlore, as his
nodding crops declare. This distressingly new board house is
his, and he has just moved out of yonder moss-grown cabin
with its one square room.
From the curtains in Benton's house, down the road, a dark
comely face is staring at the strangers; for passing carriages
are not every-day occurrences here. Benton is an intelligent
yellow man with a good-sized family, and manages a planta-
tion blasted by the war and now the broken staff of the
widow. He might be well-to-do, they say; but he carouses too
much in Albany. And the half-desolate spirit of neglect born
of the very soil seems to have settled on these acres. In times
past there were cotton-gins and machinery here; but they have
rotted away.
The whole land seems forlorn and forsaken.
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