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

to

season of the year used 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

"O Scindy, do you love me?

She said she loved me some,
An' I threw my arms around her,
Like a grape-vine round a gum."

If the dawn of summer in Virginia, when the fields grew gay in colouring and the shadows deepened in the forests, animated the Ethiopian breast, the autumn in dreamy, balmy splendour was by no means without consolation either to blacks or to whites, who lived, so to speak, with nature. The tobacco was hung up and curing in the barns; the crops, such as they were, were stored away-all but the Indian corn, which still hung its big heads from the bare stalk stripped of its leaves and its top fodder. The leanest of stock had grown fat in the rank growth that covered pasture and stubble fields alike, and carpeted even the very forests.

All nature rested from its labours and man, too (in Virginia), for the most part. There was plenty for all present needs, and weeks of bright, still weather often intervened before the chill breath of winter with its flurries of snow stripped the forests of their golden mantle, and the heavens of their long unclouded brilliancy.

The sunny days of October and November were days of plenty on the plantations. The lean times were over. Hogs were fat, and the new crop of corn was ready to grind into meal for those hot cakes which were the Ethiopian's staff of life. The mill-wheels in the valleys were humming, and along the tortuous red roads went shambling work - horses or mules, whose backs presented the familiar spectacle of a bare-legged negro urchin just visible behind a big sack of meal.

How delightful, too, were some

ginia! not very old, perhaps fifty to a hundred years at the most, but still venerable-looking with their weather-stained and spray-moistened timbers and big rumbling wheels, to whose music four or five generations at any rate had gossiped and foregathered as to a local landmark whose site nature had firmly fixed beyond the caprice of change or fortune. Pleasant places above all were these old-fashioned water-mills in the fierce hot August days; and how cool was the draught which blew up from the foaming caldron beneath the wheel as it churned round and round amid a white wreath of crystal waters fresh from dark mountain hollows, where trout leapt between banks of flowery evergreens and beneath overarching avenues of beech and chestnut! And the millers, too, of Virginia-all that I ever knew, at any rate were cheery beings of stout frame and well-powdered exteriors and strong lungs, who would crack jokes above the whirr and throb of their rude machinery with all comers, black and white, and tell stories of the gigantic crops that men made before the war in the brave days of old.

No living soul could look forward to an English autumn for its own sake with pleasure or recall it with tenderness. Certain enjoyments, it is true, belong to it, but that is wholly another matter. The season itself is one of sadness, of drippy decay, of blustering winds, of rarely unmitigated gloom. But October and November in Virginia, and indeed not seldom December also, are not merely the sportsman's saturnalia, but are largely composed of days in which mere existence is a joy, and every one worth living for itself alone a dream of golden foliage and cloudless skies, of dewy

mornings crisp and fresh, of balmy noons, of sunsets wondrous and incomparable. There is no breath of melancholy in the light and stimulating air, no suggestion of decay in the dazzling splendour of the woods: winter will come, we know, but it will fall like the curtain of a theatre on some splendid pageant which we have enjoyed till the last moment, and shall hope again to enjoy. Midwinter, it must be said, had little to offer to the plantation-owner in Virginia. Without doors, there was snow and rain, cold and sleet, iron frost or red mud of a depth and tenacity beyond the dreams of Englishmen. Within, it is true, there were immense brick fireplaces and big brass andirons, on which oak-logs of noble proportions crackled and blazed, throwing a cheery light over the wainscoted walls. Visiting was no longer thought of, farming was at a standstill, shooting was over, though the horn of the fox-hunter now and again woke the echoes of the gloomy mornings. The thud of the axe rang from the dripping or frozen woodlands, and spoke of the ceaseless cry for firewood that came from the draughty insatiable chimneys of cabin, farmhouse, and

mansion.

The very mountains, that in the greenery of their summer dress and the gorgeous splendour of their autumn robes were beyond all description beautiful, looked now only savage and almost terrible, with their miles and miles of black and leafless woodland stretching over their snowy carpet to the cheerless skies. Worst of all these dreary weeks to the planter was that which intervened between Christmas and New Year, that season which to other Christians with a white skin is a period of festivity and rejoicing. Here the

negro had it all to himself, and male and female, leaving their master to get on as best he could, abandoned themselves to those social joys so dear to the Ethiopian breast. "Cake-walks" and frolics and preachings filled the cabins with sound and merriment; whisky of a fearsome sort flowed freely, and stimulated with its unwonted fires the merry antics of the coloured revellers. Even William Henry Higginbottom once gave a party at Christmas, though to be sure it was one of those social speculations called a "pay-party," where every guest paid twenty-five cents at the door, the profits going to the genial host, who provided food, liquor, and music. As for the cake-walks, who has not heard of them?-though that indeed is a poor substitute for the privilege of having witnessed the inimitable spectacle of the sable beaux and belles strutting in couples arm-inarm before the judge, with solemn efforts to outdo each other in elegance of movement and dignity of bearing, and thus win the toothsome prize.

But volumes could be filled with the queer characters of both colours, the quaint customs and the unsophisticated ways that obtained in the country districts of Virginia in the days I write of. These days are gone for ever. Half the cabins in the State have rotted away or been burnt for firewood. Agriculture of a large and careless sort is almost dead. The negro still in a measure follows the plough or wields the hoe, but more often, as I have already remarked, is a factory-hand, a miner, a waiter, or what not, and wears on Sunday a covert coat and a pot-hat, while his wife struts at his side attired in a caricature of the latest New York fashion.

A. G. BRADLEY.

WOMAN IN

IT will not be gainsaid that, if the closing years of the present century are pre-eminent for anything, it is for the prodigious number of fads, cranks, nostrums, and neologisms which are started and put about for the quasireformation of humankind. In the words of a great statesman, "Every man has a project, every man thinks he is going to regenerate society by some perfectly unselfish but chimerical scheme, fitted more for Utopia than for modern society.":

Among these modern evolutionary novelties must be placed the movement for the so-called Emancipation of Woman. This movement divides itself into two main branches, social-economic and political. The former appertains more to the general attitude of the sex towards men in the main relations of life, such as morals, manners, employments, personal independence, freedom from restrictions, and so forth. In the latter we are asked to concern ourselves with woman as an elective unit desiring to vote on exactly equal terms with men for all offices of the State. In the present paper I propose to confine myself to the last-named aspect of the question, her demand for the parliamentary franchise, or, as it is commonly termed, Woman Suffrage, with all the consequential claims which, as its logical corollary, arise out of it.

POLITICS.

The present situation in respect of the voting powers proposed to be conferred on women is anomalous and uncertain. And the action of Mr Walter M'Laren, during the passage of the Parish Councils Bill,2 in moving and carrying an instruction empowering the Committee of the House of Commons to insert provisions in the bill practically enfranchising, for the purposes expressed therein, all women, married or single, upon equal terms with men, has not tended to settle matters, but rather the reverse. Down a mountain-side one sometimes sees an alternation of steep slopes with comparatively level platforms or ledges. Now, if a heavy rock or stone be set agoing at the summit, it will roll down the declivity with accelerating motion till it reaches a plateau, and perad venture be arrested there in its downward career perilously near the edge of the next steep. In course of time, by the action of nature's forces of disintegration by flood, landslip, or what not, the boulder will roll down a further incline, and so on till it reaches the lowest depth of all. So with political questions, in the present era especially. Some new-fangled notion new-fangled notion is dragged from obscurity by dint of much leverage and platform exertion. It is pushed to the front, and travels a little way. It may then rest awhile without making much perceptible progress, till one day

some rash legislator springs a resolution in its behalf upon Parliament, the effect of which is to hurry the thing on incontinently another haphazard stage, possibly involving the most momentous consequences, which the very mover himself may never have contemplated. The Lower House, in fact, as Mr Courtney said not long since, is becoming more and more responsive to ebullitions of popular feeling; it might be added, to ebullitions of spasmodic impulse.

The same thing is not unlikely to happen with the question of woman suffrage, though, now that the forces of faddism and fanaticism have been put to rout in the great electoral awakening of 1895, there should be less risk of rushing any startling legislative novelty through the Lower House. Happily, though there is danger of its becoming so, the female franchise has not as yet been made a party issue, for our two great political camps are at the present time curiously divided over it. Salisbury, addressing a Primrose League meeting so recently as 29th April last, made this point quite clear. "I warn you," he said, "that there is no question at present which divides parties more completely, and" (in relation to his own views on the subject) "I am not certain even that I express the opinion of the majority

Lord

of my own party." Be this as it may, to yield woman the parliamentary suffrage as a bid for her vote would of a surety be a long step downwards in political degradation.

Although it has received a certain support from both sides of the House of Commons, the cause of female suffrage has hitherto been discussed in Parliament rather as a subject of lively academical interest than as one of primary importance. It has been championed by amateurs, but no Government of this country has ever ventured to include female suffrage in its programme of measures. During the session of 1895 the question practically stood still, and the efforts of Mr Wyndham and Mr Faithfull Begg to get it a hearing in the last sitting of Parliament came to nought.2