"
With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and
fall. The masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only
the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such
ruin as this, the Lloyd "home-place":--great waving oaks, a
spread of lawn, myrtles and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a
solitary gate-post standing where once was a castle entrance;
an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood in the
ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion,
brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the
slaves who once waited on its tables; while the family of the
master has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon
and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride
on, past phantom gates and falling homes,--past the once
flourishing farms of the Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores,
--and find all dilapidated and half ruined, even there where a
solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits alone in state
among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient
coach each day.
This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,--the rich
granary whence potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to
the famished and ragged Confederate troops as they battled
for a cause lost long before 1861.
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