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this never-to-be-forgotten spectacle was, I remember, upon the Sunday on which Archie's funeral sermon was preached, in the summer following his death, and all the negroes in the neighbourhood had flocked to hear how brother Moses thought the illustrious dead was getting on in Paradise. We were sitting in the porch as the advanced-guard of the returning congregation came into view upon the highway. This consisted of those negroes who could either beg, borrow, or steal their master's mules for the day, or those who, being tenants at a money rent, had some attenuated quadruped of their own. As the capering, chattering crowd came along amid a cloud of red dust, William Henry Higginbottom could be seen holding a clear lead of several lengths, mounted on his bull, which was travelling at a steady, swinging trot that was thoroughly businesslike. That its back was no armchair was evident, for William Henry's long coat-tails were flying in painful agitation, as, with a rein in each hand, he leaned back in approved Southern fashion till his short legs, which were short even for so "low" a man, came not far off the level of the straight horns of his extraordinary steed. The ordinary negro mounted on his master's mule, and attired in his full Sunday war-paint of black broadcloth and white shirt-front, was a sight entirely edifying; but William Henry Higginbottom, leading the queer crowd upon his bull, solemn and gloomy, without the faintest suspicion of any humour in the thing, was a spectacle to have lived for.

But there was a serious side to our plantation life of course, and John Jones, who was our largest tenant, took life very seriously indeed. He held nearly a hundred

acres, and actually hired labour on his own account. Indeed he was justly regarded as "a 'sponsible man. He got a good house with his holding, built of squared logs and shingle-roofed, and a gardenpatch, and the run for a cow, which, like Archie's, no fence could turn. John worked his land on shares we providing the horses and implements, he the labour; and, like a few of his kind, at that period he was an indefatigable worker. From dawn till dark he never rested except to feed his teams and get his meals, and I have even known him to work all night when the weeds in his corn or the suckers on his tobacco had got ahead of him. In spite of his practical qualities, however, John was as comical a character in his way as William Henry. He thought he could write, for one thing—an almost unknown performance at that time-and he was inordinately proud of it. Furthermore, he had, as is rare among his race, a bad stammer with terrific facial contortions. This, as we know, is sometimes sufficiently trying in a Caucasian, but in a negro of quizzical appearance it is simply irresistible; and John's appearance was not calculated to bear any further embellishments of the kind. He was of the round, smooth, beardless, and oily type of Ethiopian, as black as a coal, without a touch of cross about him. He was a stranger to the neighbourhood, and came to us, I remember, one autumn before wheat-sowing, which was the season of the year all over Virginia for making contracts, and wheat by the way at that time was worth a dollar and a-half a bushel. I can see him now as he stood at the foot of the verandah steps, with his mouth twisted nearly round to his ear trying to tell

me who he was and what he wanted. His mania for writing, though it was in no way connected with hesitation of speech, came out instantly, and he insisted on being allowed to write down his late employer's name and address for reference. This was a great experience for us, so I fetched this phenomenal scribe a pen and ink and set him down at the office table while we watched the

performance. It was a heroic struggle, and resulted in the most extraordinary specimen of orthography probably in existence. I have got it yet. John surveyed it himself with one eye closed for a few seconds, and evidently felt that it was a failure. "He'd got sort er onused to writing," he said, "since he'd been down ter the mines, but he'd jest like to mark down his own name on the paper lest we should forget it."

This ceremony was got through with less execution, but it was as well I had not to depend on the result to save John's name and memory from oblivion. Still, the hieroglyphics stood for John Jones in their maker's estimation, and as a signature it was fairly uniform, though it was quite as like Thomas Evans or Henry Browne as it was John Jones. I never saw a man so devoted to signing his name. I believe he would have backed a stranger's bill for all he was worth, if he had been worth anything, rather than miss the opportunity.

When he settled on the plantation, I used to draw up agreements for all sorts of trifling transactions between us, to give John the pleasure of signing his name and myself the pleasure of seeing him do it. He would settle himself to the job as if to some weighty and solemn function. Slowly and with deliberation he would lay

his left cheek down almost flat upon the table, and closing his left eye, which at such close quarters became unavailable for the

purpose in hand, the squint of his right as it peered over the broad bridge of his nose at the objective point upon the paper was appalling. Little, indeed, but a big white eyeball was to be seen, and then after many flourishes of his pen above his head it descended on the sheet and left the fearful impress that signified John Jones. I generally managed to have a paper for John to sign when we had friends staying with us, and it was always voted much more entertaining than old Reuben's banjo performance, though Reuben was reckoned the best hand to "pick a banjer" in the whole neighbourhood.

The actual banjo of the plantation was not the stirring instrument it is in the hands of the Moore and Burgess minstrel, and a certain wild abandon it undoubtedly did possess in the cabin frolic after a wedding or corn-shucking, disappeared when introduced into the parlour of the "big house." Reuben, as has been said, was reckoned the best hand to pick a banjo in the neighbourhood. But when called upon to perform in private for our visitors he did not shine, and as an entertainment could not be compared for a moment to John Jones signing his name. Reuben, too, was a preacher -not a salaried, responsible minister like the dusky Boanerges who thundered weekly in the log church at Mount Hermon, but an amateur whose spasmodic exhortations formed a righteous excuse for his immediate neighbours to gather in his cabin on Saturday evening and work off their excess of religious zeal. Reuben in his hours of toil, which were not exacting, was a

So on

carpenter, and he occupied a cabin on the summit of a hill immediately in front of our windows. still nights we ourselves often had any benefit that was to be derived from the wild incantations of our eloquent dependant. This, I fear, would have been heavily discounted by the certain knowledge that Reuben could not have been trust ed for five minutes with the cornhouse key, or for as many seconds within grabbing distance of the storeroom sugar-barrel; while John Jones, who had never yet "professed," might safely have been submitted to either trying ordeal. Reuben, however, did not confine his sermons to proper times and seasons, but his anxiety for the souls of men followed him to his intermittent labours. As he nailed the shingles on to the roof of a waggon-shed he seldom failed to hurl down misquotations from the Bible on the head of the man who held the ladder; and as he swung his cradle in the wheatharvest amid the long line of reapers, the busy swish of the blades was often-much too often -accompanied by his fitful bursts of eloquence. The cabin that he then occupied acquired something of a clerical reputation, for no less than three of what for brevity's sake we may call lay brethren took it in our own time. Possibly the near neighbourhood of the graveyard, with its turfless mounds of red earth and its tangled unkempt clusters of grapevines, briers, and sassafras-bushes, may have given the old log-house some sanctified associations.

People sometimes ask if the genuine plantation negro was as comical a person as tradition represents. I can only say that to me their quaint humours were an unceasing source of refreshment. They made up, or almost made up,

for those lamentable shortcomings which grew worse as the war and "the s'render" faded further and further into the past. They have almost ceased nowadays to be a local peasantry identified with their native counties and districts, but are to a great extent a wandering race-here for a year, there for a year; first in a factory, then in a mine, then back again for a brief spell at farming. And this, though not to the advantage of their morals, has been distinctly so to their financial condition. Indeed, under the agricultural depression that has lain upon the Southern farmer for so many years, intensified as it is by iniquitous tariff laws, it was inevitable that the negro of the rising generation should leave the land. He has been a greater success, too, as a navvy or factory-hand, than he was as a farm-servant; but as a man he is an infinitely more unpleasant and much less humorous person, as is only natural. Hundreds, too, who in the days I write of were unredeemed plantation hands, whooping and holloaing at the plough-tail without a thought beyond a corn-shucking or a cakewalk, are now sleek waiters in hotels, who know as much of the devilry of city life and the outer world as there is to know. Through whole counties in Virginia the exodus of the negro to busy centres can be easily seen in the roofless cabin or the solitary chimney standing by the brookside or the forest-edge amid the broom-sedge and the briers. However strong are the forces which remove an ancient peasantry from a not unkindly and certainly a racy soil, there must be a melancholy side to it with those who have seen the change.

In the days I write of no such exodus in our part of the world

at any rate was thought of, and the Ethiopian, if unambitious, was at least cheery. Perhaps he was seen at his best in the first warm days of spring, when his limbs after the cold winter got "souple and limber," and the whole country echoed with his rude rustic melody. We always recall the month of May upon our plantation as an ideal Arcady,-when through the lush and dewy nights the opening chorus of the tree-crickets and the plaintive call of the whip-poor-will welcomed the coming summer; when a sea of snow-white appleblossoms caught the morning sun as he topped the hills upon the east of us, while upon the west the fresh greenery of summer was clothing with its leafy mantle the splendid masses of the Blue Ridge that towered above us.

All

around us glowed against the warm red soil the freshness and the lushness, the leaf and blossom, of dawning summer, and the cheery stir of rural life gave animation to a scene which nature had fashioned and bedecked with such unsparing hand. The one-horse ploughs ran merrily up and down the cornrows. The harrows clanked cheerily along their dusty course. No wonder that in such a climate farmers were sanguine, and that even the oldest of them estimated their crop with a persistent optimism at double what it turned out to be. Hope animated every rural breast. The mating dove filled the orchard with melodious notes. The cock-quail piped in the fencecorner with tireless throat, while his partner hid snugly away in the adjoining clover-field the fifteen or twenty eggs whose products were in the still far-off crisp days of November to spring before our keen-nosed pointers.

Above all, the pleasant echoes of field and woodland at that

season of the year used to ring the voices of the negroes. No people were more susceptible to stimulating atmospheric conditions than they. Nowadays, so small has the world-the Englishspeaking world, at any rate-become, that the field-hand is more likely than not to hill up his tobacco to the accompaniment of "Knock'd 'em in the Old Kent Road," or even "Tommy Atkins." In those days, however, a mighty gulf lay between Virginia and the world outside her borders: the old plantation songs were still the sole music of the plantation, and I can in fancy even now see Reuben's son Gabriel, as he swung his plough round on the headland, lifting his shiny face skywards and bulging out his chest as he roared

"O-O my lovely Lemma,

I-I do love you so;
I-I love you better tha-a-n
I ever did befo'.

O-oh-O-oh." Then from the dewy low ground, where some rival swain in leisurely fashion was slaughtering the bushes that at this season threatened the very existence of the Virginia oat crop, came an answer to the vocal challenge :

"0-0 my lovely Lemma,
I-I know you of old;
You got all de money,

All de silver an' gold."

Then from another quarter-far into our neighbour's domain — would roll the strident notes of that sonnet to "Scindy," which was the most popular air in our part of the world:

Away up in de mountain

I took my horn and blow; I tink I hear Miss Scindy callin', 'Yonder come my beau.'"

But Gabriel, though three-quarters of a mile cff, would be equal to

carpenter, and he occupied a cabin on the summit of a hill immediately in front of our windows. So on still nights we ourselves often had any benefit that was to be derived from the wild incantations of our eloquent dependant. This, I fear, would have been heavily discounted by the certain knowledge that Reuben could not have been trusted for five minutes with the cornhouse key, or for as many seconds within grabbing distance of the storeroom sugar-barrel; while John Jones, who had never yet "professed," might safely have been submitted to either trying ordeal. Reuben, however, did not confine his sermons to proper times and seasons, but his anxiety for the souls of men followed him to his intermittent labours. As he nailed the shingles on to the roof of a waggon-shed he seldom failed to hurl down misquotations from the Bible on the head of the man who held the ladder; and as he swung his cradle in the wheatharvest amid the long line of reapers, the busy swish of the blades was often-much too often -accompanied by his fitful bursts of eloquence. The cabin that he then occupied acquired something of a clerical reputation, for no less than three of what for brevity's sake we may call lay brethren took it in our own time. Possibly the near neighbourhood of the graveyard, with its turfless mounds of red earth and its tangled unkempt clusters of grapevines, briers, and sassafras-bushes, may have given the old log-house some sanctified associations.

People sometimes ask if the genuine plantation negro was as comical a person as tradition represents. I can only say that to me their quaint humours were an unceasing source of refreshment. They made up, or almost made up,

for those lamentable shortcomings which grew worse as the war and "the s'render" faded further and further into the past. They have almost ceased nowadays to be a local peasantry identified with their native counties and districts, but are to a great extent a wandering race here for a year, there for a year; first in a factory, then in a mine, then back again for a brief spell at farming. And this, though not to the advantage of their morals, has been distinctly so to their financial condition. Indeed, under the agricultural depression that has lain upon the Southern farmer for so many years, intensified as it is by iniquitous tariff laws, it was inevitable that the negro of the rising generation should leave the land. He has been a greater success, too, as a navvy or factory-hand, than he was as a farm-servant; but as a man he is an infinitely more unpleasant and much less humorous person, as is only natural. Hundreds, too, who in the days I write of were unredeemed plantation hands, whooping and holloaing at the plough-tail without a thought beyond a corn-shucking or a cakewalk, are now sleek waiters in hotels, who know as much of the devilry of city life and the outer world as there is to know. Through whole counties in Virginia the exodus of the negro to busy centres can be easily seen in the roofless cabin or the solitary chimney standing by the brookside or the forest-edge amid the broom-sedge and the briers. However strong are the forces which remove an ancient peasantry from a not unkindly and certainly a racy soil, there must be a melancholy side to it with those who have seen the change.

In the days I write of no such exodus in our part of the world

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