enough to insist on the advantages of Rome as a winter station, and as the fittest city of winter refuge for the exhausted and disabled, hors de combat, in the battle of life, to whom political affinities are immaterial; for the refugees from the nervous pressure of America, the social, political, and business burdens of England; from the immitigable boredom of German life, as well as the glittering superficiality of Parisian: all such may meet here on the neutral ground of traditions, memories, and associations that antedate all our national divisions, and even all existing nationalities. Quod est in votis. W. J. Stillman.

THE plantation that I know best lies in the heart of the cypress forest on the Black River. You may find the Black River (if you look for it on the larger maps of Arkansas; it has not sufficient rank to be named on the small maps) in the northeastern part of the State, a sinuous, evasive thread of a stream, that doubles on its track and twists and curves until it reaches the White River (which is large enough for all the maps), and so the Mississippi. There you have the rout by which our cotton sails to Memphis."

The scene from my window, as I write, is like that to be seen, this February morning, on hundreds of Arkansas plantations. Willow-shaded river, where bare twigs already show the dull red blur that is the first harbinger of the forest pageantry of spring; a wide plain greening under the February sun; fields with mouse-colored fences and freshly turned black furrows; away in the distance, negroes and mules ploughing; down the lane, a belated cotton wagon crawling to the gin, a few cows among the trees, a black pig here and

there rooting under the fences, and a dozen horses, with ragged saddles, tied to the "hitching-bar" under the great willow oak in front of the store; whitewashed houses in the fields; a big white store by the riverside; further down the bank, a big black mill; and everywhere the horizon blocked by the cypress wall,

this is a typical Arkansas landscape.

Not so typical, rather due to the planter's original scheme of color (and something to the accident of paints in stock), are the trig little blue, pink, and yellow houses scattered among the whitewashed cabins and farmhouses of an earlier day. For all their gay tints, they are as much less picturesque than their shabby comrades as they are more comfortable.

Ours, in a humble degree, is a historic plantation; it dates back to the old Spanish and French days, when Arkansas was the wild north of Louisi

iards. Certainly the Spaniards passed us, if they did not land, since one corner of the plantation abuts a tract known as the "Spanish grant." It is in shape a quadrangle, with one side gnawed away by the river. The Spaniards came up the river in their pirogues, and, not taking the trouble to survey the land, or having no instruments with them, marked out the space they wanted from tree to tree. The original grant was kept in our safe for a long time: a queer old yellow parchment, sealed with the arms of Spain.

The Frenchmen came, too. A colony of them settled on land adjoining ours, and their descendants still own the property. A few of the settlers were cadets of noble families who had strayed to the New World, and names of gallants who danced and sparkled at the court of Louis le Grand are borne by ragged farmers whose single pair of stockings will be worn out tramping at the ploughtail or guiding the cotton planter.

At this period the plantation was a dense cane brake, full of bears and deer. Later, it was settled in spots by hardy backwoodsmen from North Carolina and Tennessee. From them, but principally from the United States government, the first planter acquired his title. He brought a troop of slaves; built the mill, the store, and the older houses; and maintained for years a rude and patriarchal pomp. His great house, adorning the knoll behind the cedars, was framed, not of any native wood, the gum or cypress or oak, but of pine that was rowed to him on the water highway, every board of which was dressed by hand. Not to slight his own forests too much, his fences were made of black walnut, sacrificing I know not how many noble trees.

The house faced the river, and, with its well-houses, ice-house, smoke-house, store-house, and all the medley of servants' quarters, reared an imposing front.

VOL. LXVIII. NO. 405.

3

"In that mansion used to be Free-hearted Hospitality;

His great fires up the chimney roared; The stranger feasted at his board." Before the house glowed a garden that was the wonder of the countryside, a brilliant fairyland of gorgeous exotics, and beds of native flowers laid out in the formal geometric shapes that our grandmothers loved. Shelley's wonderful garden could not look fairer than this must have looked to the inexperienced eyes of those who drifted past it on the boats and rafts. Also,

"There was a Power in this sweet place,

An Eve in this Eden; a ruling grace." Whether poor Mattie R's charms would make any further quotation apposite one dare not decide, at this distance. She cherished flowers; she painted in oils; and half the young men of the county were in love with her. She is dead, now; dead, too, are her husband and children; and, long ago, her father, who had seen his other children fade and die, hid all earthly disappointments in the dark. Strangers rule the beautiful acres that he dreamed would descend to his children's children. The very house that he built caught fire one night, and burned to the ground. Not a brick of the huge chimney, not a shrub of the garden once so fondly tended, remains to appeal to the imagination in behalf of th. vanished, half-barbaric state.

was

Some of the pious will have it that Colonel R's bereavements were a judgment because he was an infidel, a character of rare atrocity in those days, far more shocking to Arkansas morality than a murderer. Murderers, indeed, there were in plenty, right hand and left, but Colonel Rthe first avowed atheist that any of his neighbors had ever seen. They used to tell in awed whispers of his godless library and his wicked eloquence defending his tenets, and how he raved when his favorite son was converted to Christianity, at college,

During the war the old pagan fared better than his neighbors. Back of the house was a dense thicket, where he hid his valuables, - silver, meat, and salt from the Federals, and cotton from the Confederates. This was at the time of Shelby's order to burn all the cotton, lest it fall into the hands of the Federals. Never was a bitterer secessionist than Colonel R; but, assured that the Southern hopes were dead, he had no mind to waste his good cotton on a funeral pyre.

Tradition asserts that he buried large sums of money, in bright gold pieces, a treasure that his sudden death prevented his removing; and many a gold hunter has vainly digged the earth in every direction about the site of the old house.

The war has left other traces in the legends. Both armies marched down the river, on one bank or the other. But the tragedies of the war come from the free-lance warriors, the guerrillas or graybacks, who, whatever their titles and pretenses, were in reality mere outlaws, hunted down by both armies. There is no occasion to compassionate them; robbery, murder, torture, blasted their track through the valley. Across the river is a lonesome little cypress brake, where a few chimney bricks still recall how the guerrillas murdered a whole family for their scanty hoard of greenbacks, and burned their bones under their home.

Cruelty sometimes took ghastly, mediæval shapes. The outlaws tormented men by fire, pouring hot coals down their backs or slowly roasting them; twice they pulled out a man's nails; innumerable times they flogged people cruelly; while the worst of their deviltry cannot be described. The natural result was that they were hunted down and exterminated like wolves.

Do we come to blood-stained legends, there is an endless store, for the passions had free play during the turbulent years after the war. From every win

dow in the house you can see spots where men have been killed. The trampled green in front of the store has been the arena of a dozen fights. Wherever you drive along the country roads, you pass the scene of violent death. I remember the planter's driving his New England sister and us to a little town, nine miles away. He stopped so often to relate how "a man was killed just here" that his sister finally exclaimed: "If Frank stops everywhere somebody was killed, we sha'n't get to Portia until dark! I never was in such a gory country!"

Yet to-day a more peaceful, lawabiding people than ours you will not find anywhere. Beyond a few harsh insinuations connecting chickens and the gypsies who camp every year down by the "slash," we have not a cloud on our honesty. Even our negroes do not steal. The only robbery that I know to have happened in the vicinity was the taking of Thomas Jefferson Peps's boat, and in that lone case the thieves came down the river, wicked, professional thieves from Missouri, whose dishonesty must not be charged to the account of the State of Arkansas.

What an excitement it caused! Thomas Jefferson took command of a company of mill hands, farm hands, and tenants, and rowed in hot pursuit, returning in triumph with both thieves and booty. and booty. Then, how inspiring was the spectacle at the store, converted into a temple of justice: the miserable criminals tilting their chairs before the office stove; the ministers of justice leaning their guns against the glass partition that divides office from store; Justice, in the person of Squire Holmes, enthroned at the desk; the witnesses, like Milton's Samson, "lying at random, carelessly diffused over the front doorsteps; and an interested audience, flattening their black and white noses against the other side of the partition, in the store beyond. The thieves were condemned, and packed off that same

day. They are now serving their country in the penitentiary; and, as heretofore, we go away in the evening, leaving our doors unlocked, with a tranquil mind.

A plantation, to-day, is generally an estate, a group of little farms, rented on shares. A fourth of the cotton or a third of the corn is the usual rental. The tenant, or, in our language, “the renter," has credit at the store for the probable amount of his crop. The store will supply him with all the necessaries, from drugs to agricultural implements, including occasional advances of cash.

At first, to a Northerner, it is a little startling to hear a ragged fellow, who has just bought sugar and pork, add, in the most matter-of-fact way, "And I want five dollars."

But gen

The

erally the clerk makes no more ado about giving the money than is made over the asking. This is the muchabused truck system, which, like a good many other devices of a primitive social state, it is easier to abuse than to improve. Certain it is that no system gives the absolutely penniless man such an opportunity. Sometimes, the renter will have nothing beyond his grimy hands and the rags on his back. planter finds him a house, some rude kind of furniture, a pair of mules, and the necessary farm tools, and enough coarse provision to feed him until he can market his crop. Wood is always free for the cutting. Frequently, a renter will be given the use of a cow. Pigs and chickens cost a mere trifle, and all stock hunts its own livelihood in the woods. Occasionally, a renter, in Arkansas idiom, "lights a shuck," or, more briefly, "lights out." He thus abandons his cotton; but he also leaves behind him his big debt on the store ledger.

chains whenever they gall. Last year there was a notable instance; notable, not on account of the flitting, but for the lurid and complicated lie that the deserting husband concocted. He had come here from Tennessee, and was scarce a year married to a girl on the place. Tom - his name was Tomwent about among the negro renters in his part of the plantation representing that while in Tennessee, on Colonel De Bracey's plantation, he had most innocently brought himself within the compass of the law. Colonel De Bracey had given him a bottle of whiskey, "kase he ben chillin' terrible bad," and he took this whiskey with him to a house that he was helping to build, where they all wanted some of the whiskey; and he could n't give all of his whiskey away, but he did sell them four or five drinks, at ten cents a drink. And that was how they got a warrant out against him for selling whiskey without a license. So he ran away from Tennessee; and now he had just got a letter (which he actually had taken the pains to write to himself and post at the post office in the store) warning him that his place of refuge was known, and the constable was ‘a-pursuin' of him, and dey all would sho' send him to the penitentiary. If he ben a white man, dey might turn him loose; but a colored man never had no

Tom's plaints worked on his auditors' feelings to the extent that out of their poverty they raised a little purse for him; and good, thrifty Uncle Ned Looney lent him ten dollars, and John Etta (who is not a man, but a woman, John's Etta, Uncle Ned's daughter-inlaw) drove him before sunrise to the Memphis railway station; and thus he departed with the sympathy of all. Previously, he had obtained another ten dollars " on account at the store, to

for a mule of extraordi

"boot pay as nary virtues.