‘We might rap John Bull over the knuckles in that event,’ I replied.

‘Well, suppose you did, what then?’

’Merely, England would not have a ship in six months to carry your cotton.  A war with her would ruin the shipping trade of the North.  Our marine would seek employment at privateering, and soon sweep every British merchant ship from the ocean.  We could afford to give up ten years’ trade with you, and have to put down seccession by force, for the sake of a year’s brush with John Bull.’

‘But, my good friend, where would the British navy be all the while?’

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

‘Well, well! but the Yankees won’t fight.’

’Suppose they do.  Suppose they shut up your ports, and leave you with your cotton and turpentine unsold?  You raise scarcely anything 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 two hundred mouths to feed.  I depend on the sale of my crop to give them food.  If our ports are closed, I can not 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 my previous paper, 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 Dickey?’

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

‘Yas, I is,’ said the little darky; ’you’se ugly ole massa, to gib nuffin’ to Dickey.’

Aroused by the Colonel’s voice, the woman turned towards us.  Her eyes were swollen and her face bore traces of deep emotion.