and poplar; hot with the sun and damp with the rich black swamp-land;
and here the corner-stone of the Cotton Kingdom was laid.

Albany is to-day a wide-streeted, placid, Southern town, with a broad
sweep of stores and saloons, and flanking rows of homes,--whites
usually to the north, and blacks to the south. Six days in the week
the town looks decidedly too small for itself, and takes frequent and
prolonged naps. But on Saturday suddenly the whole county disgorges
itself upon the place, and a perfect flood of black peasantry pours
through the streets, fills the stores, blocks the sidewalks, chokes the
thoroughfares, and takes full possession of the town. They are black,
sturdy, uncouth country folk, good-natured and simple, talkative to a
degree, and yet far more silent and brooding than the crowds of the
Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow. They drink considerable quantities
of whiskey, but do not get very drunk; they talk and laugh loudly at
times, but seldom quarrel or fight. They walk up and down the streets,
meet and gossip with friends, stare at the shop windows, buy coffee,
cheap candy, and clothes, and at dusk drive home--happy? well no, not
exactly happy, but much happier than as though they had not come.

Thus Albany is a real capital,--a typical Southern county town, the
centre of the life of ten thousand souls; their point of contact with
the outer world, their centre of news and gossip, their market for
buying and selling, borrowing and lending, their fountain of justice
and law. Once upon a time we knew country life so well and city life
so little, that we illustrated city life as that of a closely crowded
country district. Now the world has well-nigh forgotten what the
country is, and we must imagine a little city of black people scattered
far and wide over three hundred lonesome square miles of land, without
train or trolley, in the midst of cotton and corn, and wide patches of
sand and gloomy soil.

It gets pretty hot in Southern Georgia in July,--a sort of dull,
determined heat that seems quite independent of the sun; so it took us
some days to muster courage enough to leave the porch and venture out
on the long country roads, that we might see this unknown world.
Finally we started. It was about ten in the morning, bright with a
faint breeze, and we jogged leisurely southward in the valley of the
Flint. We passed the scattered box-like cabins of the brickyard hands,
and the long tenement-r