or the sake
of a year's brush with John Bull."

"But, my good friend, where would the British navy be all this while?"

"Asleep. The English haven't a steamer that can catch a Brookhaven
schooner. The last war proved that government vessels are no match for
privateers."

"Well, well! but the Yankees wont fight."

"Suppose they do. Suppose they shut up your ports, and leave you with
your cotton and turpentine unsold? You raise scarcely any thing
else--what would you eat?"

"We would turn our cotton fields into corn and wheat. Turpentine-makers,
of course, would suffer."

"Then why are not _you_ a Union man?"

"My friend, I have nearly three hundred mouths to feed. I depend on the
sale of my crop to give them food. If our ports are closed, I cannot do
it--they will starve, and I be ruined. But sooner than submit to the
domination of the cursed Yankees, I will see my negroes starving, and my
child a beggar!"

At this point in the conversation we arrived at the negro shanty where
the sick child was. Dismounting, the Colonel and I entered.

The cabin was almost a counterpart of the "Mills House," described in
the previous chapter, but it had a plank flooring, and was scrupulously
neat and clean. The logs were stripped of bark, and whitewashed. A
bright, cheerful fire was blazing on the hearth, and an air of rude
comfort pervaded the whole interior. On a low bed in the farther corner
of the room lay the sick child. He was a boy of about twelve years, and
evidently in the last stages of consumption. By his side, bending over
him as if to catch his almost inaudible words, sat a tidy,
youthful-looking colored woman, his mother, and the wife of the negro we
had met at the "still." Playing on the floor, was a younger child,
perhaps five years old, but while the faces of the mother and the sick
lad were of the hue of charcoal, _his_ skin by a process well understood
at the South, had been bleached to a bright yellow.

The woman took no notice of our entrance, but the little fellow ran to
the Colonel and caught hold of the skirts of his coat in a free-and-easy
way, saying, "Ole massa, you got suffin' for Dicky?"

"No, you little nig," replied the Colonel, patting his woolly head as I
might have done a white child's, "Dicky isn't a good boy."

"Yas, I is," said the little darky; "you'se ugly ole massa to gib
nuffin' to Dick."

Aroused by the Colonel's voice, the woman turned toward us. Her eyes
were swollen, and her