rled down the current towards
the Waccamaw. After long and persistent efforts had exhausted my
strength, I was about to seek for a resting-place in the swamp, when a
view of the broad Peedee opened before me, and with vigorous strokes of
the paddle the canoe slowly approached the mighty current. A moment more
and it was within its grasp, and went flying down the turbulent stream
at the rate of ten miles an hour.

A loud halloo greeted me from the swamp, where a party of negro
shingle-makers were at work. They manned their boat, a long cypress
dug-out, and followed me. Their employer, who proved to be the gentleman
whose abiding-place I was now rapidly approaching, sat in the stern. We
landed together before the old plantation-house, which had been occupied
a few years before by members of the wealthy and powerful rice-planting
aristocracy of the Peedee, but was now the temporary home of a northern
man, who was busily employed in guiding the labors of his four hundred
freedmen in the swamps of North and South Carolina.

The paper canoe had now entered the regions of the rice-planter. Along
the low banks of the Peedee were diked marshes where, before the civil
war, each estate produced from five thousand to forty thousand bushels
of rice annually, and the lords of rice were more powerful than those of
cotton, though cotton was king. The rich lands here produced as high as
fifty-five bushels of rice to the acre, under forced slave labor; now
the free blacks cannot wrest from nature more than twenty-five or thirty
bushels.

Fine old mansions lined the river's banks, but the families had been so
reduced by the ravages of war, that I saw refined ladies, who had been
educated in the schools of Edinburgh, Scotland, overseeing the negroes
as they worked in the yards of the rice-mills. The undaunted spirit of
these southern ladies, as they worked in their homes now so desolate,
roused my admiration.

A light, graceful figure, enveloped in an old shawl, and mounted on an
old horse, flitted about one plantation like a restless spirit.

"That lady's father," said a gentleman to me, "owned three plantations,
worth three millions of dollars, before the war. There is a rice-mill on
one of the plantations which cost thirty thousand dollars. She now
fights against misfortune, and will not give up. The Confederate war
would not have lasted six months if it had not been for our women. They
drove thousands of us young men into the figh