The old man was thankful to be free; but to his mind emancipation had not made everything heavenly.  The younger set of negroes ("my people” was his word) were on the wrong road.  They had “sold their birthright,” though exactly what he meant by that remark I did not gather.  “They ain’t got no sense,” he declared, “and what sense they has got don’t do ’em no good.”

I told him finally that I was from the North.  “Oh, I knows it,” he exclaimed, “I knows it;” and he beamed with delight.  How did he know, I inquired.  “Oh, I knows it.  I can see it in you.  Anybody would know it that had any jedgment at all.  You’s a perfect gentleman, sah.”  He was too old to be quarreled with, and I swallowed the compliment.

I tore myself away, or he might have run on till night—­about his old master and mistress, the division of the estate, an abusive overseer ("he was a perfect dog, sah!"), and sundry other things.  He had lived a long time, and had nothing to do now but to recall the past and tell it over.  So it will be with us, if we live so long.  May we find once in a while a patient listener.

This patriarch’s unfavorable opinion as to the prospects of the colored people was shared by my hopeful young widower before mentioned, who expressed himself quite as emphatically.  He was brought up among white people ("I’s been taughted a heap,” he said), and believed that the salvation of the blacks lay in their recognition of white supremacy.  But he was less perspicacious than the older man.  He was one of the very few persons whom I met at the South who did not recognize me at sight as a Yankee.  “Are you a legislator-man?” he asked, at the end of our talk.  The legislature was in session on the hill.  But perhaps, after all, he only meant to flatter me.

If I am long on the way, it is because, as I love always to have it, the going and coming were the better part of the pilgrimage.  The estate itself is beautifully situated, with far-away horizons; but it has fallen into great neglect, while the house, almost in ruins, and occupied by colored people, is to Northern eyes hardly more than a larger cabin.  It put me in mind of the question of a Western gentleman whom I met at St. Augustine.  He had come to Florida against his will, the weather and the doctor having combined against him, and was looking at everything through very blue spectacles.  “Have you seen any of those fine old country mansions,” he asked, “about which we read so often in descriptions of Southern, life?” He had been on the lookout for them, he averred, ever since he left home, and had yet to find the first one; and from his tone it was evident that he thought the Southern idea of a “fine old mansion” must be different from his.