and they frequently wear cheap jewelry which they have purchased at the same establishment.  The dandies in the younger set flourish canes and assume all the languishing airs that distinguish the callow fops of the white race.  Many visitors are received at the most popular houses, and they are observed sitting with the families of their hosts and hostesses under the shade of the trees until a late hour of the afternoon.  Some pass from cabin to cabin, not stopping long at any one, but finding a cordial welcome everywhere.  Some linger very late, and make their way back by the light of the moon.  As they move along the low-ground road their voices can be heard very distinctly from the hills above as they talk and laugh together; and sometimes they vary the monotony of their walk by singing a hymn, the sound of which is borne very far on the bosom of the silence, and is sweet and soft in its cadence, mellowed as it is by the distance and idealized by the nocturnal hour.

There are two church-edifices on the plantation, one of which is used during the week as a public school, but the other was built expressly for religious worship.  Both are plain but comfortable structures, the outer and inner walls of which have been whitewashed and the blinds painted a dark green.  Around them are wide yards, carefully swept; otherwise their neighborhoods are rather forbidding, on account of the silence and darkness of the forests in which they are situated, the only proof of their connection with the world at large being the roads which run by their doors.  The pulpit of one is filled by a white preacher of Northern birth and education, who removed to this section after the war; and the only objection that can be urged against him is that he often holds religious revivals at the time when the tobacco-worm is most active in ravaging the ripening plant.  The negroes who have to walk several miles after their work is over to get to his church are kept up till a late hour of night and in a state of high excitement, and are so overcome with fatigue the following day that they dawdle over their tasks.  These revivals are also celebrated at the other church, but always in proper season; for the minister there is not only sound and orthodox in his doctrines, but he is also a planter on his own account, and, therefore, able to understand that the interests of religion and tobacco ought not to be brought into conflict.

Many parties are given every year, and they are attended by several hundred negroes of both sexes, who have come from the different “quarters,” and even from other plantations in the vicinity.  The owner of the plantation always supplies an abundance of provisions—­a sheep or beef, flour and meal—­for the feast that celebrates the general housing of the crops, which is to the laborers what the harvest-supper is to the peasantry of England.  The year, with its varied labors and large results, lies behind them, the wheat, tobacco, and corn have