fed the cows at milking-time, no, that would give them too much to occupy their minds; he preferred to chase them over the back yard, making futile dives at them, the function commonly ending in a grand and lofty tumbling act, with a somersault by the milk pail.

But his happiest exploit was cleaning the turkey. We did not expect him, when he moved the stoves, to get them back again in safety, and it was no surprise to see the stovepipe towering above the hole, while Eustace stared, mouth agape, muttering, "It done growed!" But we did suppose that he, a farm darky, knew how to clean a turkey. We had underrated his genius for blunders. He split the turkey laboriously up its breastbone, from the neck to the tip of the spine; and the appearance of that large fowl flopping palely over the platter is beyond words to describe!

The most repulsive trait in the negro's character is his atrocious relish of cruelty. It exceeds apathy over other creatures' pain; it is veritable enjoyment. Look at the flashing of teeth at the struggles of a broken-backed cat or a half-decapitated chicken! Hear the spectators laugh! They are as pleased as if you had given them a drink of whiskey. Yet in these brutal torturers of animals you may find not only ardent affections and a pathetic loyalty, but generosity, cheerfulness, sunny good humor, the social instincts, and an amazing meekness under provocation.

The paradox bewildered us; but my own notion of the explanation is that the cruelty of the negroes, like the cruelty of children, comes from a torpid imagination. They have not sense enough to realize the misery that they inflict. It is the grotesque antics, not the suffering, of the cat or chicken that delight them. Eustace, - here is a corroboration of the theory, being the very stupidest negro that ever served us, was also the most cruel.

Our negroes are neither more nor less superstitious than their kind in the South generally. The conjurer makes a figure here as elsewhere. In Arkansas we are not voodooed, and we are rarely hoodooed, but we are frequently conjured. The conjurer is a homelier personage than the weird witch queen of Louisiana. He or she rents his land, makes a crop, and trades at the store, like any ordinary black mortal; the conjure business is a kind of side show. He sells herbs and potions and charms, and if custom lags he can scare it into activity by his baneful arts; for not only has he all the common stock in trade, mysterious sickness, blasted crops, and the like, but he of Arkansas owns the gift of throwing lizards into objectionable darkies! This has been done on our plantation more than once, as most respectable colored testimony will vouch, with fatal effect.

Happily, the planter has a strong "conjure medicine,' known to the world as Epsom salts, the use of which is attended by the best results. We did have a conjure doctor, but he died. The most powerful conjurer in these regions is "old man Brown." Singularly enough, although this old scoundrel is suspected of two or three murders, he is a member of the church, “in good and regular standing."

"How can that be?" one of us asked our man Albert,- not Eustace, who knows no more about conjuring than he does about anything else; and Albert, grinning, answered: "Dunno; he say he got 'surance of salvation. Reckon dey all does n't das tu'n him out."

The trade in charms is always brisk. A rabbit's left hind foot has a steady value. The skin of the rabbit's stomach is of great use in helping babies to cut their teeth; it should be tied round the child's neck. A great deal depends on the moon. If you plant by the dark of the moon, expect trouble. You should never "kill" by the dark of the moon, either, for the meat will "all

This lore is believed by whites and blacks alike. The whites have no fear of the direful con"ha'nts" scare jurer, but ghosts or them as readily as the negroes.

The plantation abounds in spirits of an uneasy turn of mind. A large white ghost haunts the lane; nobody seems to know why, since nothing tragic has ever happened there.

long, smooth road was the racecourse on which the young fellows of the neighborhood used to run their horses. Those were the days when the barrel of whiskey rolled into the stores as regularly as the barrel of molasses. Saturday night revels were certain to follow the Saturday afternoon races; and it must be a poor white man that could not earn the right to a thumping headache for Sunday morning. There was not much ready money to stake, but horses, cows, saddles, guns, even houses and lands, used to change hands. A common challenge was, "I'll bet twenty dollars in good property!"

The answer would be, "Name your property!

"My claybank colt. against it?"

"My two heifers."

What you got

Thus the bet would be arranged. Wagers ran high, and in their excitement the gamblers would bet the very clothes off their backs. One poor spendthrift lost his trousers

the spot.

and paid on

There

of

" in the

We ourselves have a "ha'nt house. There once lived on the plantation an erratic reformer, a sort of rural Artegal. I have tried elsewhere to describe him, giving little color of my own to his strange missionary work. His end came in the semblance that one would expect from the country and the time: he was shot and mortally wounded while walking out of our garden. He was carried into the room that is our dining-room. And ever since that boisterous March morning, when Whitsun Harp was borne across our threshold, never does the wind rise that his ghostly bearers do not come again with their burden. Night, or morning, or noon, they pass through the wide gallery on soundless feet; their invisible fingers lift the latch; we see it rise; the door swings open; it swings back; they are in the room!

How can
What do they do there?
I know? They do not show; probably
they go out again.

George Rose's "ha'nt" ought not to be mentioned in the same breath with ours, an ignominious pretender, that capered and hooted and pounded on the Roses' roof successfully enough to drive them out of the cabin and win a great name, and then had not the wit to keep hidden, when the planter explored its

haunts, but let him shoot it for a foolish owl!

Our best spectre however, may pass muster anywhere. It is the shade of old R- in his habit as he lived; and it patrols his buried treasure. The planter told me the following tale. "We used," said he, "to have an old sailor on the estate, and one day, a little while after he came, he was out ploughing in the field just back of the old mansion, and I happened to come along. Says he, 'Did anybody pass you?' I answered, 'No.' 'Well,' he said, 'I saw a man.' Something had happened to the double-tree of his plough, and he was bending over it, adjusting it, and when he looked up there was a man standing there, watching him; but his mules began to prance, frightened of a sudden, and he turned to soothe them, and when he looked again the man had gone. I asked him how the man was dressed. He said he was very well dressed, but he did n't look like any of the people about here; he was an elderly man with a gray beard, wearing a white suit that looked just ironed, and a wide white straw hat, and he had a mighty pretty riding-whip in his hand. Well, there's the strange part of it, he described old R exactly; and lots of people are sure it was the old fellow looking out for his money. I know the man never had heard the stories, and of course never had seen Colonel R

It was the very place where they had hid the salt and the silver."

Now, if any one is expecting an explanation of this apparition from the present writer, I beg that gentle reader to undeceive himself at once. I do not propose to cast slurs on the fair fame of our ghosts; and my own surmises shall be forever locked in my own breast.

To return, however, from this excursion into the night side of Nature, as Mrs. Crowe would say, to the Arkansas renter. The Arkansans are a

mixed race, and their touch of Spanish and French ancestry has given a peculiar character to their physique. The native Arkansans commonly have olive skins, dark eyes, slender forms, and delicate features, like the Canadian habitants. Perhaps to their Spanish. blood is due a grave imperturbability of demeanor that would not disgrace one of Cortez's soldiers; and, no matter how low his worldly fortunes may fall, the Arkansan keeps a rude courtesy. He is a stoical soul. Indeed, one finds him too stoical. The keynote of his existence is a patient endurance of avoidable evils. The old story is to the point still: when it rains we can't mend the roof, and when the sun shines the roof does not need mending.

As an illustration of plantation methods and the Arkansas character, we always remember our cowshed. The plantation carpenter being too busy with houses to condescend to cowsheds, we appealed to Thomas Jefferson Peps, who is indifferently carpenter, blacksmith, wood sawyer, butcher, or tinker, and between whiles makes a crop. Thomas Jefferson is amiability itself; he said that he would build a shed for us "jest too quick."

The interview was on Thursday. Friday it rained. Saturday was "pigkilling day." Sunday, of course, we could not expect him, but we were comforted to know that he was "studying 'bout us. Monday he appeared in person with a "helper," it always takes two men to do anything in the South, if it be no more than mending a fence, and they looked at the yard and talked together for half an hour. Tuesday he came again, and carried off our best hatchet. Wednesday he really set to work, and worked steadily, effectively, and, according to plantation standards, rapidly, until the shed was complete save for doors. Then he was called away to make a coffin. He said, very justly, that cows could wait on him better than "co'pses," and that

as soon as he "got Gather Robinson's coffin done he would fix our doors jest too quick."

I trust that he was not two months making the coffin, but two months did we wait doorless; meanwhile, Albert nailed the cows in every night, and unnailed them every morning.

The shed is one experience; the smoky chimney with which the plantation talent. wrestled for a whole winter is another. Each wrestler made it smoke a trifle worse. Finally the chimney was built over, been in the first place, umphed!

as it should have and we tri

There was But why enumerate? We have learned a lesson worth all our besetments; we might have learned it from old Ben Franklin, for it was he was it not? who said, "If you want a thing done well, do it yourself."

We came South three helpless women, accustomed to have men open the doors for us. One of us had a pretty conceit of her artistic cooking; and yet we were obliged to send for an old black woman to show our Northern cook - and us - how to make bread with

out compressed yeast. Now, thanks to Amy, our present waitress (from the North), we are accomplished paper hangers and house painters, and thanks to Christine, our cook (also from the North), we can spread whitewash artfully over our fences and outbuildings. Indeed, should need come (and Need, like a good neighbor, drops in without formality), we can show a variety of handicrafts. Constance is a good machinist, mending the broken locks and lamps; Madonna, who is the carpenter, makes beautiful furniture out of packing-boxes and cretonne.

We are

our own best glaziers, and once we built up a demoralized chimney with old bricks and an improvised mortar of sand and whitewash.

We are six miles, through the worst swamp in Arkansas, from the nearest railway; nevertheless, the ox team goes

two or three times a week to the station, we being but pusillanimous rustics who require ice and fresh beef, instead of slaying our own flocks and herds and cooling our milk and wines in a "wellhouse."

You can live very well on a plantation if, as the negroes say, "you understand yourself." Usually, there is plenty of game. In winter we eat our own mutton and beef; but when spring comes the beef cannot be kept, and we have the alternative of importing beef by express, or living on the diet of the country, pig, lamb, and fowl.

Pork is the principal article in the diet of the people, fresh pork in winter, salt pork in summer. Every autumn there is a hog hunt down in the bottom, where the hogs run wild. The hunters camp out for a week, and return with hundreds of hogs.

Once, Constance and the writer rode to one of these hunts. It is a wild sport. The hogs look more like the boars that rend the dogs on Snyders' canvases than the sleek black porkers of Berkshire. They are chased with dogs; and what with the shrill clamor of the horns, the baying of the hounds, and the shouts of the men, what with the mad gallop through the forest, leaping the logs, beating down the cane, dodging the flying lassos of vines and the spiked branches of thorn-trees, the sport sets the pulses jumping. Indeed, if you add its spice of peril (for the hogs fight savagely), no sport in this country can rival it.

As I have said, pork is the dependence of the hungry Arkansan; but we keep flocks as well as herds, and kill lambs in the spring, while before the humblest cabin there is a cheerful cackling of fowls. Two dollars and a half a dozen we are expected to pay for "hens," and seventy-five cents for a turkey. Eggs are ten cents a dozen. Meat, by which, in Arkansas, pork is always understood, rates from four to

has acquired a taste for flour, of late years, and flour is expensive compared with corn meal from his own corn, which he brings to the mill Saturday afternoons, and has ground for a primitive toll of a sixth of the meal. He has also taken to "store truck; "that is, canned vegetables, meats, and fruit. Did he choose, or rather did his wife choose, he could have a store of his own canned tomatoes, corn, and fruit. This is a wonderful country for vegetables: witness the hot-bed that Eustace made in the "way we does in Mississippi," and yet our sturdy lettuce and radishes are growing!

Three times a day the coffee-pot steams on an Arkansas "cook-stove.' In passing, I may remark that poor indeed is the family in our country that does not have a cook-stove and a sewing-machine. Last year, the agent for an expensive range sold half a dozen eighty-dollar ranges to sundry farmers and renters (most of them black), while there is hardly a cabin so squalid that it has not a sixty or seventy-five dollar sewing-machine humming amid the beds and the children.

The coffee-pot and the frying-pan are sinners against the health of the people more inveterate and pernicious than the overflows or the damp air that are blamed for their ague. They cannot be charged at first hand with the other prevalent disease, pneumonia; but they aid and abet thin clothing and reckless exposure. A little prudence might save many lives, but prudence is not one of our virtues.

If he be not prudent, virtues of a different cast the Arkansas renter does possess. He has plenty of industry, although he may lack energy. He is brave, honest, hospitable as an Arab, and good-natured as an Irishman; and one feature of Arkansas character (for that matter, of Southern character) is

the absence of the hungry and merciless curiosity as to the affairs of others that one notices so often in Northern rural communities.

Said good Jeremy Taylor: "Every man hath in his own life sins enough, in his own mind trouble enough, and in the performance of his offices failings more than enough, to entertain his own inquiry; so that curiosity after the affairs of others cannot be without envy and an evil mind." Whatever our faults, we are not evil-minded. white morality has, it must be admitted, a certain laxity as regards the family ties. Man and wife part easily, but they commonly observe the legal forms.

The

The Arkansas cracker has a shrewd sense of humor and plenty of imagination; both of which qualities are crystallized in his dialect, just as his mingled French and Spanish descent is visible in our common words. "Boydark” (bois d'are), a hedge, "bateau," "pi"levee," "cache it," you may rogue, hear any day. A sort of rude poetry shows in such phrases as "mighty quick weather," meaning uncertain weather; "burn the wind," to run fast; "r'arin' and chargin'," a synonym for furious anger; "can't make a riffle" (ripple), a metaphor to express utter worthlessness; or "light out" for run away. The roads are "only muddy shoe mouth deep." Sometimes they are muddy enough "to mire a saddle blanket. The grim humor of primitive life peeps out of other phrases.

"You owed the devil a debt," says a strange old proverb, "and he paid you in sons-in-law! "

"Come to git a fire?" the hostess demands of a visitor making a brief stay, in hospitable sarcasm, alluding to old times when matches were rare, and a neighbor might run over to borrow a brand from the fireplace. To “bunch rags is jocose for "to fight.” your name in the pot means that are expected to a meal.

"Got

you

I am told