"Ah!" said Jim in telling his adventures, "we hed a clus run on 't, Sairy, but thee'd better believe that air British navy's a fust-rate place fur larnin' a feller ter know when he's well off. An' Sairy, when I longed so fur thee an' mother, an' thought o' what a wretch I was to speak so ter the dearest little woman in the world, I c'u'd see that I hadn't knowed when I was well off."
Jim's was not an unselfish kind of repentance, but it was the best it was in his nature to offer, and Sarah had long ago learned that her Jim was not the saint and hero she had once dreamed, but only a weak and common-place man; and she asked for nothing higher from him. To his best she had a right, and with that she was content, smiling on her husband with eyes full of a love as tender and true as when in the old days she had gazed down upon her lover from the cliff-head, while the mother laid her hand softly on his scanty hair, and said solemnly, "May God keep thee thus, my son!" adding, after a moment's pause, "But I wish thy fayther was here to see." And a tender silence for the memory of the rough but kindly-natured old man fell over them all; while the baby, reconciled to the stranger, poked her little fingers in the marks on his face, and cried because she could not get them off.
ETHEL C. GALE.
AT THE OLD PLANTATION.
TWO PAPERS.—II.
The eastern sky is just beginning to assume that strange neutral tint which tells of the approaching dawn when we open the heavy hall door and step out into the crisp, frosty air. No moonlight hunting for me, with the cold, deceitful light making phantom pools of every white sand-patch in the road, and ghostly logs and boulders of every wavering shadow. You are always gathering up your reins for leaps over imaginary fence-panels, which your horse goes through like a nightmare, and always unprepared for the real ones, which he clears when you are least expecting it. If the cry bears down on you, and you rein up for a view, the fox is sure to dodge by invisibly under cover of some dark little bay, and you get home too late for a morning nap and too early for the breakfast, which you have been longing after for the last two hours. Then, too, your horse has lost his night's rest, and will be jaded for two days in consequence. No: the time to throw the dogs off for a fox-hunt is that weird hour which the negroes significantly call "gray-day:" it is the surest time to strike a trail, and by the time Reynard begins to dodge and double there will be plenty of light to ride by and to get a good view. If the fox gets away or the cover is drawn without a find, you are always sure of having your spirits raised by the cheerful sunrise: by the time you get home, tired and spattered, the ladies are down stairs ready to make pretty exclamations over the brush or to chaff you pleasantly for your want of success; and then there is just time to get your hair brushed and your clothes changed before the mingled aromas of fried sausage and old Java put the keen edge on your already whetted appetite.
A ride across country after a rattling pack of English hounds on a thoroughbred hunter with a field of red-coated squires is an experience which few hunters on this side of the water have ever enjoyed, but with the incidents of which every reader of English novels is familiar. The chase of the red fox in Maryland or Virginia has some features in common with the British national sport, but that of the gray fox in the more southern States differs materially from both. The latter animal is smaller and possessed of less speed and endurance than his more northern brother, but he is far more common and quite as cunning. He makes shorter runs, but over very different ground, always keeping in the woods and dodging about like a rabbit, so that a different style of horse and a different method of riding are required for his capture. There is no risk of breaking your neck over a five-barred gate or a stone wall, but you may be hung in a grapevine, or knocked out of the saddle by a low limb, or have your knee scraped against a tree-trunk. It is true you may catch your fox in twenty minutes, and three hours is an extraordinary run, but then you may catch four or five between daylight and ten o'clock of an autumn morning.
The horses stretch their necks toward the stables and whinny as they think of the bundles of untasted fodder: the dogs require no notes of the horn to rouse them, for they know the signs and are already capering about in eager merriment, throwing their heads into the air occasionally to utter a long and musical bay. This wakes up the curs about the negro-yard, and their barking stirs up the geese, the combined chorus rousing all the cocks in the various poultry-houses, so that we ride off amid a hub-bub of howling, cackling, neighing and crowing which would awaken the Seven Sleepers. We are first at the meet, and the old woods ring with the mellow, winding notes of our horns—no twanging brass reeds in the mouth-pieces, but honest cow-horn bugles, which none but a true hunter can blow. The hounds grow wild at the cheering sound, and howl through every note of the canine gamut; the echoes catch the strain and fling it from brake to bay; the dying cadence strengthens into an answering blast, and the party is soon increased to half a dozen bold riders and twenty eager dogs. Venus, the beautiful "flag-star of heaven," is just toning her brilliancy into harmony with the pale light which creeps slowly up from the eastern horizon, and some wakeful crow in the pine-thicket gives an answering caw to the goblin laugh of the barred owl in the cypress, as we leap our horses into a field of sedge and cheer on the dogs to their work. For half an hour we ride in silence save the words of encouragement to the hounds, which are snuffing about unsuccessfully and whipping the hoar-frost with their tails from the dry yellow stems of the grass. Now and then some eager young dog opens on the trail of a rabbit which has started from its form, but the crack of a whip restrains him, and the other hounds pay no attention to him. Suddenly a sharp, quick yelp comes from the farthest corner of the field, and the older dogs stop instantly and raise their heads to listen. Hark to old Blucher! There he is again, and the whole pack give tongue and dash off to the call which never deceives them. We catch a glimpse of the old fellow's white throat as he trots about in a zigzag course, poking his tan muzzle into every clump of tall grass and giving tongue occasionally as he sniffs the cold trail. Presently a long, quavering cry comes from old Firefly; again and again Blucher opens more and more eagerly; another and another dog takes it up, and the trot quickens into a lope. The trail grows warmer as they follow the line of fence, and just as we settle ourselves in the saddle for a run it all stops and the dogs are at fault. But Blucher is hard to puzzle and knows every trick of his cunning game. Running a few panels down the fence, he rears up on it and snuffs the top rail, and then, with a yell of triumph, dashes over it into the woods, with the whole pack in full cry at his heels. A ringing cheer announces that the fox has "jumped," and the field scatters in pursuit. Two only, the subscriber being one, follow the dogs with a flying leap. Some dash off in search of a low panel, others to head off the cry through the distant gate, while others stop to pull the rails and make a gap. For ten minutes we keep well behind the hounds, with a tight rein and heads bent to avoid the hanging oak limbs. But the fox has turned and plunged into a brake which no horse can go through, and we draw up and listen to decide where we can head him off with the greatest certainty; then turn in different directions and spur through the young black-jacks. Ah! there he goes, with dragging brush and open mouth, and the pack, running close enough together to be covered by a table-cloth, not sixty yards behind him. I am in at the death this time, for he cannot run a hundred yards farther, and the brush is mine, for there's no one else in sight. With a savage burst the dogs dash after him into the thicket and then—dead silence, not a yelp, as they scatter and run backward and forward, nosing under every dead leaf and up the trunk of every tree. The fault is complete, and the young dogs give it up and lie down panting, while the older hounds try every expedient to puzzle out the trail and take up the scent again. He certainly has not treed, there is neither earth nor hollow to hide him, and yet the scent has gone! And it never came back. If any reader can tell what became of that fox, he is a wiser man than I. Certain it is that we never heard of him again; and for aught I know to the contrary, he may have been that identical Japanese animal which turns into tea-kettles and vanishes in puffs of smoke. It does not take long, however, to make another find, and we go home after a three hours' chase with two fine brushes and appetites which would ruin any hotel-keeper in a week.
After breakfast a walk to the cotton-houses would be in order, for the successful planter is he who trusts nothing to the overseer which can have his personal supervision, and he must excuse himself to such of his guests as prefer a cigar by the library fire to an hour spent in observing the details of plantation work. In the days of which I write horse-power was preferred to steam, and negro-power to both; and few planters of the fine black-seed cotton could be convinced that any "power-gin" could be invented which would not injure the long, silky "staple" or fibre of the lint. The old-time "foot-gins" were used exclusively, and the gin-house was a place of curious interest to all visitors. In one end of the long room was the huge pile of seed-cotton which was to pass through the rollers as the first step toward its preparation for the market. How simply does a sudden stroke of inventive genius solve a problem which wise men have regarded as insoluble! Not much more than a century ago a commission of practical English savans discouraged the cultivation of a textile fabric which "might be useful but for the impossibility of clearing it of the seeds!" But the foot-gin appeared on the scene, and indigo went down before cotton. Ranged along the walls of the room are some twenty rough wooden frames, looking like a compromise between a straw-cutter and a sewing-machine, each furnished with two strong rollers operated by a treadle and acting precisely like those of a clothes-wringer. Behind each of these machines stands a man or woman with one ever-moving foot upon the treadle-board, feeding the seed-cotton from a large bag to the greedy rollers, which seize it and pass the lint in fleecy rolls into another bag prepared for it, while the seed, like shirt-buttons touched by the afore-mentioned wringer, rolls off from the hither side to form a pile upon the floor. Thence it will be carted to the seed-house to be rotted into manure for the next crop, there being no better fertilizer for cotton than a compost of which it forms the base. A portion of it, however, will be reserved to be boiled with cow-peas and fed to the milch-cattle, no food being superior to its rich, oily kernel in milk-producing qualities. The negro mothers use it largely in decoction as a substitute for cocoa, and the white mothers under similar circumstances having it parched and ground like coffee, when it makes an exceedingly palatable and nutritious beverage. The "green-seed" or short-staple variety is far inferior to the black for this purpose, and produces white, sticky, cottony-looking butter; indeed, most dairywomen insist that "you can pick the lint out of it." The ginned cotton is carried to the platforms, where it is "specked" by the women—leaves, dirt and other impurities being picked out by hand—and spread out to dry and bleach in the sun; thence we follow it to the "moting-room," where it is thoroughly and finally overhauled, every minute particle of dirt or other foreign matter and every flock of stained and discolored cotton being picked out. This room is always in the second story, and at one end of it a circular hole is cut in the floor; through this hole hangs the bag of strong, close gunny-cloth, very different from the coarse covering which suffices for the lower grades of "short-staple," supported by a stout iron hoop larger by some inches than the hole in the floor, and to which the end of the bag is securely sewed. The cotton is thrown into this bag and packed with an iron rammer by a man who stands in it, his weight assisting in the packing, each bag being made to contain upward of four hundred pounds.
Everything seeming to go on as it ought and all the necessary orders and directions being given, we walk out to take a look at the poultry. There are fowls in abundance and superabundance, but our kind host is most proud of his flock of three hundred white turkeys; and a beautiful sight they are, scattered over the grassy lawn. Ranging, as these fine birds will, over a mile or two of woods abounding in their wild brethren, convenient mistakes were often made by the pineland gunners, whose rifles were always ready to pick off a stray gobbler without waiting to know whether he was wild or tame, and so the old gentleman introduced the white stock to prevent the possibility of such errors. For a similar reason no ducks were raised except those which wear top-knots. It is no unusual thing for wild gobblers and mallards to come up with the tame stock to the poultry-yard, and the bronze feathers and shy habits of many of the young turkeys show evidence of their free parentage.