FLIGHT OF THE INHABITANTS.

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Such panic flights were often worse than useless. Woe unto that house which was found entirely deserted! To the honor of Southern housewives be it recorded, that the majority of them remained to protect their homes, whilst their husbands and slaves ran off the live stock from the plantations.

The flight from Milledgeville, including the stampede of the Rebel State legislators, who barely escaped being entrapped by our army, the crushing of passengers and private effects into the overloaded cars, the demand for wheeled vehicles, and the exorbitant prices paid for them, the fright, the confusion, the separation of families, formed a scene which neither the spectators nor the actors in it will soon forget.

The negroes had all along been told that if they fell into the hands of the Yankees they would be worked to death on fortifications, or put into the front of the battle and shot if they did not fight, or sent to Cuba and sold; and that the old women and young children would be drowned like cats and blind puppies. And now the masters showed their affection for these servants by running off the able-bodied ones, who were competent to take care of themselves, and leaving the aged, the infirm, and the children, to the "cruelties" of the invaders. The manner in which the great mass of the remaining negro population received the Yankees, showed how little they had been imposed upon by such stories, and how true and strong their faith was in the armed deliverance which Providence had ordained for their race.

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CHAPTER LXVII.

PLANTATION GLIMPSES.

In travelling through the South one sees many plantations ruined for some years to come by improper cultivation. The land generally washes badly, and where the hill-sides have been furrowed up and down, instead of being properly “horizontalized," the rains plough them into gulleys, and carry off the cream of the soil. Or perhaps neglect, during four years of war, has led to the same result. Many worn-out plantations are in this condition, the gulleys cutting the slopes into ridges and chasms.

In Georgia, as in parts of Alabama, one becomes weary of tracts of poor-looking country, overgrown with sedge-grass, or covered with oaks and pines. The roads, never good, in bad weather are frightful. Never a church steeple relieves the monotony of the landscape. Occasionally there is a vil lage, its houses appearing to be built upon props. If standing upon a ridge above the highway or railroad by which you pass, the sight of the blue sky under them gives them a singular appearance.

It is customary, all through the South, to build countryhouses in this manner, and rarely with cellars. The props, which are sometimes of brick, but oftener of fat pine, which makes an underpinning almost as durable as brick, lift the building a few feet from the earth and allow a free circulation of air under it. This peculiarity, which strikes a stranger as unnecessary, is not so. A Northern man of my acquaintance, settled in North Carolina, told me that he built his house in the New-England style, with a close underpinning; but soon discovered that the dampness of the earth was causing the lower timbers to rot badly. By opening the underpinning, and ven

PLOUGHS.

OVERSEERS. - BUILDINGS.

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tilating the foundation, he succeeded in checking the decay. Let Northern men emigrating to the South take a hint from his experience. No doubt many Southern customs, which appear to us irrational or useless, will thus be found to have originated in common sense and necessity.

I was too late to see the cotton-picking, and too early for the chopping-out and hoeing, but in season to witness the preparation of the ground for planting. Sometimes, in a gang of fifty or sixty laborers running as many ploughs on the fields of a large plantation, there would be twenty or thirty women and strong girls. The sight of so many ploughs in motion, each drawn by a single mule, and scratching its narrow furrow three inches deep, was of itself interesting; and the presence with the ploughmen of the stout black ploughwomen added to it a certain picturesqueness.

I have already related how my ignorance was enlightened with regard to the manufacture of ploughs on Alabama plantations. I afterwards saw the blacksmiths at work upon these somewhat rude implements, and learned that some of the larger plantations manufactured their own carts and wagons. The plantation harness is a simple affair, and is nearly always made on the place. While the negro women are spinning and weaving cloth in rainy weather, the men are bending hames, braiding mule-collars of corn husks, and making back-bands of leather or bagging.

I found that some of the large plantations had, besides a white superintendent, two black overseers, one whose sole business was to take care of the ploughs and hoes, and one who looked after the mules and other live stock.

The buildings of a first-class plantation form a little village by themselves. There is first the planter's house, which is commonly a framed dwelling of good size, with two or four brick chimneys built outside. There is not a closet in the house. The pantry and dairy form a separate building. The kitchen is another; and the meat-house still another. Next in importance to the planter's house is the overseer's house. Then come the negro quarters, which, on some plantations I