You must go fifteen miles before reaching another of these springs or fountains, and then ten more to the last of the chain, the famous Eutaw Springs of Revolutionary memory.  Here, then, must be a subterranean river or reservoir at least twenty-eight miles long, teeming with the same fish which swim in the surface-streams, yet having no discoverable connection with any of these.  We meet with no rocks or stones anywhere, but our walk leads us past many marl-pits from which numerous fossil remains have been obtained.  The fertile and superstitious imagination of the negroes has not been idle in such a suggestive field, and they have peopled these fountains with spirits which they call “cymbies,” akin to the undine and the kelpie.  On Saturday nights you may hear a strange rhythmic, thumping sound from the spring, and looking out you may see by the wild, fitful glare of lightwood torches dark figures moving to and fro.  These are the negro women at their laundry-work, knee-deep in the stream, beating the clothes with heavy clubs.  They are merry enough when together, but not one of them will go alone for a “piggin” of water, and if you slip up in the shadow of the old oak and throw a stone into the spring, the entire party will rush away at the splash, screaming with fear, convinced that the “cymbie” is after them.

Leaving the spring behind us, we pass up the long lane between two cotton-fields of a hundred acres each, in which the blackened stalks are still standing, as are the dried cornstalks and gray pea-vines in the field beyond.  These will remain until the early spring, when they will be cut down and “listed in” with the hoe, for not a foot of this rich and profitable plantation has ever been broken with the plough.  Incredible as it may appear, there is not a plough or a work-horse, and but one old mule, upon this highly-cultivated tract of one thousand acres.  All the hauling is done by ox-teams, with three sturdy negroes to each cart, and the heavy cotton-hoe does everything else.  Where one man and a plough could till three acres, twenty men and women with hoes ’ridge up the ground, scatter manure in the furrows, and draw the ridges down on it again.  True, the surface only is scratched, and the soil is soon exhausted, but who cares for that when there is abundance of rich timber-land from which to clear new fields? and as to economizing labor, that is the last thing a planter cares about, for what are the negroes to do?  None are ever sold, the “picknies” who swarm around every cabin growing up to stock the plantations bought for each child as he or she “comes of age or is married,” and work has to be made for them to do.

“What shall I put the hands at to-day, sir?” asked an overseer of an old planter when the last bale of cotton had been packed.

“Hum! let’s see!  Well, set them to filling up the old ditches and digging new ones.”