ncreased four-fold and the value of
lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life
of careless extravagance among the masters. Four and six bobtailed
thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay
entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with
flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled "big
house," with its porch and columns and great fireplaces.

And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,--a
certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and
tinsel built upon a groan? "This land was a little Hell," said a
ragged, brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a
roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master's
home. "I've seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked
aside, and the plough never stopped. Down in the guard-house, there's
where the blood ran."

With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The
masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only the irresponsible
overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin as this, the Lloyd
"home-place":--great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles and
chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where
once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting
bellows and wood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old
mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the
slaves who once waited on its tables; while the family of the master
has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off
the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, past phantom gates and
falling homes,--past the once flourishing farms of the Smiths, the
Gandys, and the Lagores,--and find all dilapidated and half ruined,
even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits
alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient
coach each day.

This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy,--the rich granary whence
potatoes and corn and cotton poured out to the famished and ragged
Confederate troops as they battled for a cause lost long before 1861.
Sheltered and secure, it became the place of refuge for families,
wealth, and slaves. Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land
began to tell. The red-clay sub-soil already had begun to peer above
the loam. The harder the slaves were driven the more