to your room to ask if you'll go
with me up the country. My d----d overseer has got away, and I must
follow him at once."

"I'll go with pleasure," I replied. "Which way do you think Moye has
gone?"

"The shortest cut to the railroad, probably; but old Caesar will track
him."

A servant then announced breakfast--an early one having been prepared.
We hurried through the meal with all speed, and the other preparations
being soon over, were in twenty minutes in our saddles, and ready for
the journey. The mulatto coachman, with a third horse, was at the door,
ready to accompany us. As we mounted, the Colonel said to him:

"Go and call Sam, the driver."

The darky soon returned with the heavy, ugly-visaged black who had been
whipped, by Madam P----'s order, the day before.

"Sam," said his master, "I shall be gone some days, and I leave the
field-work in your hands. Let me have a good account of you when I
return."

"Yas, massa, you shill dat," replied the negro.

"Put Jule--Sam's Jule--into the woods, and see that she does full
tasks," continued the Colonel.

"Haint she wanted 'mong de nusses, massa?"

"Put some one else there--give her field-work; she needs it."

On large plantations the young children of the field-women are left with
them only at night, and are herded together during the day, in a
separate cabin, in charge of nurses. These nurses are feeble, sickly
women, or recent mothers; and the fact of Jule's being employed in that
capacity was evidence that she was unfit for outdoor labor.

Madam P----, who was waiting on the piazza to see us off, seemed about
to remonstrate against this arrangement, but she hesitated a moment, and
in that moment we had bidden her "Good-bye," and galloped away.

We were soon at the cabin of the negro-hunter, and the coachman,
dismounting, called him out.

"Hurry up, hurry up," said the Colonel, as Sandy appeared, "we haven't a
moment to spare."

"Jest so--jest so, Cunnel; I'll jine ye in a jiffin," replied he of the
reddish extremities.

Emerging from the shanty with provoking deliberation--the impatience of
my host had infected me--the clay-eater slowly proceeded to mount the
horse of the negro, while his dirt-bedraggled wife, and clay-encrusted
children, followed close at his heels, the younger ones huddling around
for the tokens of paternal affection usual at parting. Whether it was
the noise they made, or their frightful aspect, I know not, but the
horse, a