So we sit musing,
until, as we turn a corner on the sandy road, there comes a
fairer scene suddenly in view,--a neat cottage snugly en-
sconced by the road, and near it a little store. A tall bronzed
man rises from the porch as we hail him, and comes out to
our carriage. He is six feet in height, with a sober face that
smiles gravely. He walks too straight to be a tenant,--yes, he
owns two hundred and forty acres. "The land is run down
since the boom-days of eighteen hundred and fifty," he
explains, and cotton is low. Three black tenants live on his
place, and in his little store he keeps a small stock of tobacco,
snuff, soap, and soda, for the neighborhood. Here is his
gin-house with new machinery just installed. Three hundred
bales of cotton went through it last year. Two children he has
sent away to school. Yes, he says sadly, he is getting on, but
cotton is down to four cents; I know how Debt sits staring at
him.
Wherever the King may be, the parks and palaces of the
Cotton Kingdom have not wholly disappeared. We plunge
even now into great groves of oak and towering pine, with an
undergrowth of myrtle and shrubbery.
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