English farm-servants. Their families had generally got out of hand, but the older darkies were often the very models of industry, and even honesty. One old man in particular whom we found upon the plantation, renting an outlying cabin and a few stony acres in a mountain hollow, was of this description. So far as cleared land went, he had what he would have called "a mighty po' chance fur terbaccer," which at that time was the crop which dazzled and filled the eye of the emancipated slave. But old Uncle Archie had two or three stalwart sons who worked out for wages, and when he went into this dignified retirement he forgot that the patriarchal era was over in Virginia between parent and child as between master and slave. The old gentleman was quite surprised when his "chaps" showed a disposition to appropriate their own wages to their own uses. Archie had built his own cabin after the war in a corner of the plantation at the foot of a heavily timbered mountain, whence a crystal brook, breaking from the shade of the forest, went babbling over his patch of open tillage land. Up over this wide expanse of oak and chestnut foliage the old man had gazed with sanguine eye, and pictured the tall trees tumbling in every direction, and vast tobaccolands opening, beneath the sturdy strokes of his obedient and filial offspring-inspired, of course, and directed by the wisdom that lay beneath his own snowy brow. But Archie's " chaps" showed no disposition whatever to develop a family estate for their clothes and rations, when they grew to be worth ten dollars a-month to any farmer in the neighbourhood. "I've dun frailed them chillern" (they were eighteen and twenty) "till my arms jes ache," the old

VOL. CLXI. NO. DCCCCLXXVII.

man used to complain, "but it ain't no manner of use-these new-fangled notions of projeckin' roun' fust hyar den dar, there ain't no satisfyin' young folks these times."

So the forest above Archie's cabin continued to wave in all its pristine luxuriance, and to this day the wild turkey still leads her young in summer-time beneath its friendly shades, and the squirrel gambols amid its huge grey trunks, and the spotted woodpecker still wakes with cheery tapping its mysterious echoes.

Uncle Archie, it will be gathered, was a laudator temporis acti of the most pronounced kind. I think he would have reversed the issue of the war and put his whole race back into slavery again, if he had had his will. The times, according to Archie, were all out of joint. The revolt of his sons sat sorely on his mind. He had been an industrious, hard-working man all his life, and had belonged to a kind but hard-working masterone of those thousands of small slave-owners of whom the usual literature on this subject shows its ignorance by taking no account. Rough, decent men, whose appearance, education, habits, and means were those of small working farmers, neither more nor less, who owned perhaps a couple of families of coloured folks, and not seldom laboured with them on the small farm that supported all.

paniment of the dawn of civilisation. But Virginia is the oldest community of Englishmen outside England. It is an ancient and

even

a distinguished province. For over two centuries it has had something like a territorial aristocracy living upon its soil. Their pleasures and their interests have been wholly rural. No people have ever existed in the wide world to whom country locomotion was more important. And yet in most parts, not only till the Civil War but up to this very day, the twohorse plough has been the only factor in road mending and construction. Over these unspeakable tracks of mud, pleasantly broken by slabs of rock and wandering treeroots, it was not only the waggon of rural commerce that had to jolt, but the family coach itself to rock and stagger on its way to dance or wedding, to church or merry-making-and with what loss of dignity can be well imagined. These old relics of past splendour (as the word is used in Virginia), with their leather springs, have long vanished now. But I can recall many a venerable specimen that survived the war, and can see them even now writhing in all the agonies of a bottomless mudhole, the negro coachman craning forward with loud shouts of wonderfully worded exhortations to his struggling horses. It was many years before these rickety emblems of ante-bellum dignity disappeared entirely from the road. One after another they made their final trip to the village wheelwright, to be hopelessly condemned even by that resourceful functionary, and left, perchance, to rot upon the wayside amid the wreck of humbler machinery. Much sorrowful consolation, I have reason to think, was afforded by these bleaching skeletons to the ex-family retainer

as he passed by with his mule- or his ox-cart, and dropped the tributary tear to the ghost of the old family conveyance, which he had once steered with such éclat. Some of these old carcasses survive to this very day-in remote corners of barnyards and orchards—buried in briers and weeds, a harbour of refuge for the "broody" hen and roosting turkey. Our road, it was true, was perhaps the worst, if there could be a worst, in the county. It was lifted for a considerable part of its course off the red clay of the lower country, and wound its tortuous way over the shoulder of mountain-spurs, where the winter rains did not stand, but tore into atoms every feeble effort that was made to soften the natural obstacles of rock and gully. It was a road that would have made even a Rocky Mountain teamster hold his breath. But our local patriots were quite equal to the occasion, and used to declare, when twitted by people who were fortunate enough to live off it, that it was, at least, a fine winter road. That is to say, you couldn't sink permanently into a mud-hole-you either broke your neck or got over it.

But then, again, it was almost as bad in summer; whereas in the lower country, when the mud hardened on the track, a reckless driver with a fast horse and a strong buggy could make five miles an hour with luck.

Our neighbourhood was beyond doubt a bit isolated, and this perhaps accounted for the fact of oldtime ideas dying harder than in other parts with which I am familiar-particularly among the negroes. Of these, great numbers of the best of the old régime were still, at the time I write of, living and in their prime, and some of them were in every sense as reliable and as trustworthy as good

English farm-servants. Their families had generally got out of hand, but the older darkies were often the very models of industry, and even honesty. One old man in particular whom we found upon the plantation, renting an outlying cabin and a few stony acres in a mountain hollow, was of this description. So far as cleared land went, he had what he would have called “a mighty po' chance fur terbaccer," which at that time was the crop which dazzled and filled the eye of the emancipated slave. But old Uncle Archie had two or three stalwart sons who worked out for wages, and when he went into this dignified retirement he forgot that the patriarchal era was over in Virginia - between parent and child as between master and slave. The old gentleman was quite sur prised when his "chaps" showed a disposition to appropriate their own wages to their own uses. Archie had built his own cabin after the war in a corner of the plantation at the foot of a heavily timbered mountain, whence a crystal brook, breaking from the shade of the forest, went babbling over his patch of open tillage land. Up over this wide expanse of oak and chestnut foliage the old man had gazed with sanguine eye, and pictured the tall trees tumbling in every direction, and vast tobaccolands opening, beneath the sturdy strokes of his obedient and filial offspring-inspired, of course, and directed by the wisdom that lay beneath his own snowy brow. But Archie's "chaps" showed no disposition whatever to develop a family estate for their clothes and rations, when they grew to be worth ten dollars a-month to any farmer in the neighbourhood. "I've dun frailed them chillern" (they were eighteen and twenty) "till my arms jes ache," the old

VOL. CLXI.-NO. DCCCCLXXVII.

man used to complain, "but it ain't no manner of use-these new-fangled notions of projeckin' roun' fust hyar den dar, there ain't no satisfyin' young folks these times."

So the forest above Archie's cabin continued to wave in all its pristine luxuriance, and to this day the wild turkey still leads her young in summer-time beneath its friendly shades, and the squirrel gambols amid its huge grey trunks, and the spotted woodpecker still wakes with cheery tapping its mysterious echoes.

Uncle Archie, it will be gathered, was a laudator temporis acti of the most pronounced kind. I think he would have reversed the issue of the war and put his whole race back into slavery again, if he had had his will. The times, according to Archie, were all out of joint. The revolt of his sons sat sorely on his mind. He had been an industrious, hard-working man all his life, and had belonged to a kind but hard-working masterone of those thousands of small slave-owners of whom the usual literature on this subject shows its ignorance by taking no account. Rough, decent men, whose appearance, education, habits, and means were those of small working farmers, neither more nor less, who owned perhaps a couple of families of coloured folks, and not seldom laboured with them on the small farm that supported all.

He was an

Archie had looked forward to running a bit of rented land with his own family upon somewhat the same principles-inclusive of the whip, if needed. ardent member of the Baptist Church, and had hoped, no doubt, for a leisurely as well as a dignified old age in which he could pursue on fence-rails and at cross-roads that taste for religious discussion and controversy which his soul de

2 A

lighted in. Still he raised a tobacco crop of a sort, enough to prove, at any rate, that the filial instincts of Jake and Wash were not wholly dead; and his corn-patch supplied at least his daily bread. A pig or two, moreover, called him owner, and carried ruin and destruction in the point of their snouts all over the plantation; and a cow, which, even with a forefoot tied to its horns, could jump any fence in the neighbourhood, completed Archie's stock.

The old gentleman was quite as honest as he knew how to be. He never succeeded in paying any rent, it is true; but the desire to do so was the burden of many an eloquent harangue, which was something. Archie, however, as a weather prophet and as a character which memory is thankful for, was well worth the twenty-five dollars a year which constituted his nominal tribute. He died in the odour of sanctity-lecturing us all to the last on the degeneracy of the world since "the s'render," and foretelling the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah for a land where age and authority were getting to be at such a discount. We had a negro burial-ground on the plantation, and thither Archie's remains were dragged in solemn state by his neighbour William Henry Higginbottom's bull. There was snow on the ground, I remember; but it was a Sunday, and half the negroes in the county were there. It was always said that the patriarch would "walk," and "walk" he did, sure enough, for he was seen in the full moon of the April following his death sowing a big field near the house that had been fallowed for oats; for it should be remarked that he was the great grain-sower of the neighbourhood, and it was natural enough that his spirit should rest uneasy while the

dust of the harrows was actually flying over his new-made grave. He was seen again, too, in the same week by Lizzie, our cook, hovering in spectral fashion around the tobacco-plant-beds he had sown just before his death. We were, indeed, already somewhat overrun with ghosts-thanks to the possession of two graveyards, whose inmates, if negro tradition were to be believed, were of the most uneasy kind.

I may remark in passing that the ghosts, or, in negro parlance, the "hants," of our neighbourhood seem to have retained, even in the after-world, their devotion to agriculture. For whether white or black, it was in the dawn of spring that they were always "looked for "; nor, like orthodox ghosts, did they haunt bedsides or passages, but were to be seen rather in the neighbourhood of corn-cribs, wheat-fields, or tobacco barns.

The mention of Archie's funeral obsequies recalls another of his neighbours and our tenants, who held a remote corner of the plantation, and this was the aforesaid William Henry Higginbottom. Most of the negroes after the war took their late masters' names, but no Higginbottom had ever been heard of in those parts. This was serious, it is true, but not unnatural, seeing that the bearer of so much name had come from the lower counties since the war, and was in some sort an alien as well as a suspect. Negro nomenclature was of a brief order as a rule, and it was probably in tacit disappro val of William Henry's personality, and of the sort of mystery attaching to him, that he was usually called by all his three names, and, in spite of his grizzled locks and furrowed face, never achieved the honoured sobriquet of "Uncle."

In face William Henry was the most forbidding, in form he was the most comical, negro I ever saw. We found him inhabiting a cabin close to the house, and thought at first his looks might belie him. It took about a month to find out

from experience that they did not. Hence his removal to the slope of the mountain where he undertook to raise corn and tobacco on shares. William Henry was, to use the vernacular of the neighbourhood, a "mighty low man "-in a physical sense, that is to say-for he was barely five feet, while he had a head upon him the size of a Missouri pumpkin. He could neither laugh nor could he joke like the rest of them. I never saw him even smile, but there sat upon his black seamed face a perennial frown. In winter and in summer he wore a long tail-coat that had once been black; and if the front view of him was hideous, his reverse side was much the funniest in the whole county to look upon. But what made William Henry famous, even more than his whispered crimes and his grotesque appearance, was his bull.

For when he moved to his mountain farm with nothing but his household truck, it seemed a problem to the neighbours how his stony acres were to be cultivated; but William Henry was equal to the occasion, and one fine day his establishment was seen to be augmented by a twoyear-old bull that was as mysterious in origin as the owner himself. There was no direct evidence that our Mephistopheles was a great criminal, but he was said to be capable of any enormity. That he stole that bull I am afraid there was no doubt, and it was whispered that he drove it, with the help of the Evil One, whom

It pulled the rough-hewn sled on which he hauled his firewood and his fence-rails; while on its broad back, behind a sack of corn, he himself might often be seen perched upon his way to the mill. Such spectacles as these, however, were not unfamiliar in the old happy-go-lucky Virginia life. even in Virginia, so far as I ever saw or heard of, the bitting, bridling, and saddling of a bull was an unprecedented performance.

But

And

But William Henry was nothing if not unconventional. it was with no sense of humour whatever, but in a solemn seriousness which heightened the sublimity of the spectacle, that he used to clap an old broken hunting-saddle on to the broad back of the patient ox, and seat himself astride thereon, and turn his face on Sunday mornings towards the negro church at Mount Hermon. Mr Higginbottom, it is perhaps needless to remark, was no church member. The vacant seats upon the mourners' bench had no attraction for him, nor had the eloquent black forefinger or strident appeals of brother Moses ever moved a muscle of the scowling furrowed face. But, for some mysterious reason, William Henry was always to be found at Mount Hermon on a preaching Sunday

silent, inscrutable, and hideous in a back pew - while outside, hitched to a tree in the shade, stood the Durham bull, with its saddle and bridle, all unconscious of any indignity of treatment.

The first time we ever sighted