is occasionally varied by an opossum caught in the woods, or a hare trapped in the fields; but they much prefer corn bread and bacon as regular fare to anything else.  They dislike wheat bread, as too light and unsatisfying, and they always grumble when flour is measured out to them instead of meal.  Coffee is a luxury used only on Sunday.  The table is set off by a few china plates and cups, but there are no dishes, the meat being served in the utensil in which it is cooked.  On working-days breakfast and dinner are carried to the hands in the fields by a boy who has collected at the different houses the tin buckets containing these meals.

The hands are as busy in winter as during any other part of the year.  Much of their time is then taken up in manipulating the tobacco, which has been stored away in one large barn, and preparing it for market, the first step toward which is to strip the leaves from the stalk and then carefully separate those of an inferior from those of a superior quality.  Although there are many grades, the negroes are able to distinguish them at a glance and assort them accordingly.  They are not engaged in this work of selection continuously from day to day, but at intervals, for they can handle the tobacco only when the weather is damp enough to moisten the leaf, otherwise it is so brittle that it would crack and fall to pieces under their touch.  They like this work, for the barn is kept very comfortable by large stoves, they do not have to move from their seats, and they can all sit very sociably together, talking, laughing, and singing.  It contrasts very agreeably with other work which they are called upon to do at this season,—­namely, the grubbing of new grounds, from which they shrink with unconcealed repugnance, for outside of a mine there is no kind of labor more arduous or exacting.  The land cleared is that from which the original forest has been cut, leaving stumps thickly scattered over the surface, from which a heavy scrub-growth springs up.  Active, quick, and industrious as the negroes may be in the tobacco-, corn-, or wheat fields, they show here great indolence, and move forward very slowly with their hoes, axes, and picks, piling up, as they advance, masses of roots, saplings, stumps, and brush, which, when dry, are set on fire and consumed.  The soil exposed is a rich but thin loam of decayed leaves, in which tobacco grows with luxuriance.

In February or March the laborers prepare the plant-patch, the initial step in the production of a crop that remains on their hands at least twelve months before it is ready for market.  They select a spot in the depths of the woods where the soil is very fertile from the accumulated mould, and they then cut away the trees and underbrush until a clean open surface, square in shape and about forty yards from angle to angle, is left, surrounded on all sides by the forest.  Having piled up great masses of logs over the whole of this surface, they set them on fire at one end