but still using sickles on half-acre tasks; and the stack yard was aswarm with sable men and women carrying sheaves on their heads and chattering as of old in a dialect which a stranger can hardly understand.  The ante-bellum hospital and many of the cabins in their far-thrown quadruple row were still standing.  The site of the residence, however, was marked only by desolate chimneys, a live-oak grove and a detached billiard room, once elegant but now ruinous, the one indulgence which this planter permitted himself.

[Footnote 30:  American Agriculturist, IX, 187, 188, reprinted in DeBow’s Review, IX, 201-203.]

The ubiquitous Olmsted chose for description two rice plantations operated as one, which he inspected in company with the owner, whom he calls “Mr. X.”  Frame cabins at intervals of three hundred feet constituted the quarters; the exteriors were whitewashed, the interiors lathed and plastered, and each family had three rooms and a loft, as well as a chicken yard and pigsty not far away.  “Inside, the cabins appeared dirty and disordered, which was rather a pleasant indication that their home life was not much interfered with, though I found certain police regulations enforced.”  Olmsted was in a mellow mood that day.  At the nursery “a number of girls eight or ten years old were occupied in holding and tending the youngest infants.  Those a little older—­the crawlers—­were in the pen, and those big enough to toddle were playing on the steps or before the house.  Some of these, with two or three bigger ones, were singing and dancing about a fire they had made on the ground....  The nurse was a kind-looking old negro woman....  I watched for half an hour, and in all that time not a baby of them began to cry; nor have I ever heard one, at two or three other plantation nurseries which I have visited.”  The chief slave functionary was a “gentlemanly-mannered mulatto who ... carried by a strap at his waist a very large bunch of keys and had charge of all the stores of provisions, tools and materials on the plantations, as well as of their produce before it was shipped to market.  He weighed and measured out all the rations of the slaves and the cattle....  In all these departments his authority was superior to that of the overseer; ... and Mr. X. said he would trust him with much more than he would any overseer he had ever known.”  The master explained that this man and the butler, his brother, having been reared with the white children, had received special training to promote their sense of dignity and responsibility.  The brothers, Olmsted further observed, rode their own horses the following Sunday to attend the same church as their master, and one of them slipped a coin into the hand of the boy who had been holding his mount.  The field hands worked by tasks under their drivers.  “I saw one or two leaving the field soon after one o’clock, several about two; and between three and four I met a dozen men and women coming home to their cabins,