And now gently the night stole o’er us—­

  “Night, so holy and so calm,
  That the moonbeams hushed the spirit,
  Like the voice of prayer or psalm”

and until the “wee sma hours,” while three generations listened intently, we swapped stories with our generous “Crackers.”

Our patriarch host had been a captain in the rebel army until he had his “belly full of fight,” as he quaintly termed it.  His wife had blest him with an even score of boys and girls, all now living in this delightful climate, where he said, “no one ever died; they simply dried up and blowed away into the happy hunting-grounds beyond the stars.”  When a baby was born or a child married, this chief of the tribe “hitched on” another house, until now the one-story dwellings covered an acre of his vast lands.

He and his tribe raised on his great farm here in Bradford County everything he needed to eat, drink, or to wear:  his wife and daughters spun and wove their clothing from the cotton grown and ginned on his own fields; the delicious syrup and sugar which adorned and sweetened the mountains of rye pancakes and floods of home-raised coffee, was made from the cane which was grown, and ground on his own soil.  He grew his own tobacco, tea, peanuts, oranges, figs, pineapples, bananas; he fattened his cattle and hogs on his own cassava and the abundant wild grasses; his flocks of sheep “cut their own fodder,” and the wool and mutton was all clear profit.  This “Cracker” family was the happiest and most independent I ever saw on earth.

All around this plantation are millions of uncultivated acres where the wretches of our city slums could be equally happy if our Carnegies and Rockefellers would only loan the funds to colonize them there.  The millions of dollars, now worse than wasted by our selfish millionaires? could thus soon make this earth a paradise like to that above.  After enjoying this free delightful life for several days, and we were on the point of departing, I said to our host, “Captain, we have enjoyed your hospitality immensely, and I hope you will allow me to reciprocate,” holding toward him a bank-note.

Instantly his eyes flashed angry fire, he shot out his fist to strike me, when a neighbor said, “Don’t hit him Cap, he don’t know no better, he’s a Yank.”  “Wall Yank,” drawled this six feet of fighting man, “seein’ ye don’t know no better, I’ll let ye off this time; but I don’t keep no tarvern, and when me and my family come yure way, we’ll all stop with yew, that’ll even it up.”  As I looked at the fifty yawning caverns of chewing mouths, and reflected upon the cost of feeding them in Boston for even one day, I thanked God that I had not given him my card, and we rode away amid ear-splitting cheers and waving of hands, each one of which resembled in size the tail-board of a coal-cart.