newly-bought plantation. First he bought a thousand acres of wild land for twenty-five thousand dollars-five thousand down; then four or five families of negroes at New Orleans, twenty-five thousand more—half cash. And now he was ready to clear away the forest, and raise cotton, to buy more negroes, to raise more cotton, to buy more negroes, to raise more cotton; and so on, until tired of the monotonous accumulation.

There were Virginians, also, who had been spending the winter in New Orleans, and were now returning home before the hot season should commence. They were attended by their servants; and nicer, better behaved, more intelligent, gentlemanly and ladylike people of colour it would be difficult to find anywhere.

We had politicians and preachers, and three Sisters of Charity, going home to their mother house in Maryland. All over the South these Sisters travel free. Where there is yellow fever they have friends, and no Southerner would touch their money.

At last we are at Montgomery. It is a beautiful little town, of ten thousand inhabitants, built upon more hills than Rome, with deeper valleys between them. It is a city of palaces and gardens; not crowded into a narrow space, but spread out broadly over the hills and valleys, with wide streets, handsome villas, elegant shops, and such gardens as only the South, with its glorious wealth of foliage and flowers, can give. A large and handsome domed state-house crowns one of the finest eminences.

Montgomery is the centre of one of the best cotton districts, in the best cotton state—a state of sixty thousand square miles— and the plantations, which stretch away on every side, were in the highest state of cultivation. Every negro could make five or six bales of cotton, besides raising his own corn and bacon. A hundred negroes, therefore, besides their own support, made

five or six hundred bales of cotton, worth twenty-five or thirty thousand dollars, which represents the clear profit of a wellconducted plantation. The yearly export of the single town of Montgomery was 106,000 bales, amounting to 5,300,000 dollars a-year. Well might it be prosperous and rich. There may have been poor people, but I saw none. In a thousand miles of that country one never sees a hand held out for charity. On every side is abounding wealth. of such a city is like nothing in Europe. wealth, style, and fashion in a town like Montgomery, of ten thousand inhabitants, than in a European town of eighty or a hundred thousand.

The population
There is more

The cotton lands are ploughed into beds in March-the seed is sown in drills, and the plant, when it first comes up, is as tender as the bean, which it slightly resembles in its early growth. It soon becomes hardy, grows very fast, acquires a strong stalk, with widely spreading branches. In May it begins to flower on the lower branches, the blossoms opening white, and in one night turning to a beautiful red. A boll, shaped like a hickory-nut, succeeds the flower, and this, as it ripens, opens in four or five compartments, showing the white cotton which envelopes the seeds. The cotton on the lower parts of the shrubs is fit to pick while the upper part is in blossom, so that the picking commences in August and continues until Christmas. As fast as it is picked in the field. it is separated the fibre from the seed, by the gin, a collection of saws acting between the bars of a grate, and the cotton is pressed in bales, ready for the market. Good land produces two bales an acre, weighing four hundred pounds each, and usually worth about thirty dollars a bale. Planters raise from fifty to a thousand bales.

During my visit I made several excursions into the surrounding country and among the planțations. The fields were being ploughed for the cotton planting. The ploughing was

M

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done by the mules and women. They took it very easy. could not see that they hurried to the fields or in the fields. The overseer planned and directed the work. He rode from field to field, when it was going on, to see that the men with their hoes, and the women, driving the mules, or guiding the ploughs, did their work properly.

He had a whip, but I
If I wished to paint a

never chanced to see him use it. picture of careless enjoyment, it would be a portrait of a young negress I saw riding afield on her mule, on a plantation in Alabama. Her figure, attitude, expression-all told volumes of a care-free life of easy, saucy, animal enjoyment.

Montgomery, like most of the considerable towns in America, has its cemetery laid out like a park or pleasure-ground, which was becoming filled with ambitious marble monuments. A portion of the ground is set apart for negroes, and they, too, have their grave-stones, which record their humble virtues. I was struck by the original form of a marble monument which an honest German had raised to an adopted son who had been drowned in the river. The epitaph was so peculiar that I copied it:

"Stop as you pass by my grave. Here I, John Schockler, rest my remains. I was born in New Orleans, the 22nd of Nov., 1841; was brought up by good friends; not taking their advice, was drowned in this city in the Alabama river, the 27th of May, 1855. Now I warn all young and old to beware of the dangers of this river. See how I am fixed in this watery grave; I have got but two friends to mourn."

I shall always remember Montgomery as a bright, beautiful, elegant, and hospitable city, and worthy, from its refinement and hospitality, of a prosperous, and noble destiny.

CHAPTER XIX.

FROM CLEVELAND TO MEMPHIS.

MEMPHIS, a beautiful little city of the South, rises before me like a picture, and I see again the sweeping torrent of its great river, the shore lined with busy steamers loading with cotton, the precipitous bluffs, or alluvial banks, rising a hundred feet from the river brink, the streets, the spires, the villas and gardens of a lovely town, in a fertile and beautiful country.

Memphis — the name carries us back thirty centuries to Egypt and the Nile. Our Memphis is of to-day, and carries us across the ocean to America and the Mississippi. When the old world peopled the new, the emigrants took with them the names of the places they discovered or peopled. In the West Indies and Spanish America we have San Salvador, San Domingo, Santa Cruz, Santa Fé. The French, in Louisiana and Canada, gave the names of saints and European cities, or adopted Indian designations. Thus we have St. Lawrence, St. Louis, New Orleans, Montreal, Ontario, Niagara, Cayuga, Ottawa, Penobscot, Minnehaha, Tonewanda, etc. The English settlers of the American colonies at first took English names, and the oldest towns are called Jamestown, Yorktown, Richmond, Charleston, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Boston, Exeter, Cambridge, Hartford, Albany, Baltimore, and a hundred others. These are repeated over and over. The names of several of the States evince their English origin, as New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The Dutch, German and Scandinavian settlers also gave their own familiar names to their settlements. But as the number of towns and villages increased, it was necessary to have more names, and people adopted those of every famous city in the world, from Babylon,

Nineveh, Thebes, Memphis, Troy, Athens, Rome, Antioch, Carthage, Jerusalem, to Lisbon, Madrid, Lyons, Genoa, Florence, Smyrna, Moscow, and so on to Pekin and Canton. A few hours' ride on a New York railway will carry you through the famous cities of Troy, Utica, Rome, Syracuse, Amsterdam, and Geneva. As the proper names of the eastern hemisphere became exhausted, and the Washingtons, Jeffersons, Jacksons, and other popular American names had been repeated in every State, another rich supply was found in the often musical designations of the aboriginal languages. These were sometimes resorted to even in the early history of the country. Four of the great lakes retain their ancient names of Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan. Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Oregon, and Wyoming are Indian names of States.

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Let us return, or rather proceed, to Memphis. I was in the pretty town of Cleveland, on the south bank of Lake Erie, in Ohio, when the summons came. The distance is about eight hundred miles, and I had my choice of several routes. could go a hundred miles to Pittsburgh and the rest of the way by steamer; I could take a steamer at Cincinnati; I could go west, by Chicago, to the Mississippi, and so down that river; but I took the most direct and rapid route, by rail across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Cairo, and thence on the Mississippi.

The cars, as the Americans designate their railway carriages, on the road from Cleveland to Cincinnati, were about the nicest I have ever seen. They were not only brightly painted, gilded, comfortably seated, and furnished with retiring-rooms, but warmed in winter, cooled in summer, and thoroughly ventilated always. In the warmest days of an American summer, with the thermometer at a hundred and the train