parents stroll off and take a
woodland path, which, after many a twist and turn amid thickets of
sweet myrtle and purple-berried Bermuda Shrub, brings them to the
summit of "The Bluff."

Standing there, they look down upon the river, two hundred feet
below. Upon the further side lie fields, all brown and golden in the
sunshine, level and limitless; they stretch into the purple dimness
where cypress trees loom upon the horizon, their flat tops mingling
dreamily with the soft autumnal hazes. Far away, amid the sun-bathed
fields, stand the trees which shelter the plantation home, whose
chimneys and white gables are scarce visible save where a stray
sunbeam falls upon them.

"So to the Jews fair Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between,"

murmured the mother, as she glanced at her husband, to whom she knew
the lands spread before them were, by inheritance and long
association, far dearer than could be measured by the mere money
value.

Descending again to the ferry, they find the carriage already in the
flat, and the children scarce restrained by Mammy from crossing
without their elders. They draw deep breaths of delight as they watch
old Bartley, with active limp, loosen the chain, and, planting his
iron-shod pole deep into the grating sands, send the flat upstream;
then, at a given point, they watch with intense admiration his skill
in taking the sweeps and shooting swiftly to the other side.

The horses know that they are near home, and prick up their ears, and
go briskly onward. Scarcely a quarter of a mile is gone before the
buildings of the "lower plantation" come into view,--a row of cabins
built irregularly upon the highest points straggle along the river
banks. Each cabin has its little garden with its row of coleworts and
its beehives, or perhaps a pumpkin or two shows its yellow sides amid
the withered vines. Outside the cabins, fish-nets are hung to dry, and
from within comes the sleepy drone of a spinning-wheel; about the
doorstep hens are scratching, while from around the corner a cluster
of little woolly heads peep out shyly.

Standing in the mellow sunlight, amid fields of ripening corn, with
the river gently flowing between levees of such strength as to set
floods at defiance, these cabins seem the very embodiment of peaceful
security; the high piles, though, upon which they stand, are rather
suggestive, and give a hint of what the now peacefully flowing stream
is capable of when rous