This was the "home-
house" of the Thompsons,--slave-barons who drove their
coach and four in the merry past. All is silence now, and
ashes, and tangled weeds. The owner put his whole fortune
into the rising cotton industry of the fifties, and with the
falling prices of the eighties he packed up and stole away.
Yonder is another grove, with unkempt lawn, great magno-
lias, and grass-grown paths. The Big House stands in half-
ruin, its great front door staring blankly at the street, and the
back part grotesquely restored for its black tenant. A shabby,
well-built Negro he is, unlucky and irresolute. He digs hard
to pay rent to the white girl who owns the remnant of the
place. She married a policeman, and lives in Savannah.
Now and again we come to churches. Here is one now,
--Shepherd's, they call it,--a great whitewashed barn of a
thing, perched on stilts of stone, and looking for all the world
as though it were just resting here a moment and might be
expected to waddle off down the road at almost any time.
And yet it is the centre of a hundred cabin homes; and
sometimes, of a Sunday, five hundred persons from far and
near gather here and talk and eat and sing.
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