‘Perhaps you will,’ said the Colonel, laughing, ’but I won’t.  Nigger property isn’t of much account, but you’re too good a darky, June, to be sent to the devil for a charge of turpentine.’

‘Tank you, massa, but you dun kno’ dis ole ting like I do.  You cudn’t blow her up nohow; I’se tried her afore dis way.’

’Don’t you do it again; now mind; if you do I’ll make a white man of you.’ (This I suppose referred to a process of flaying with a switch; though the switch is generally thought to redden, not whiten, the darky.)

The negro did not seem at all alarmed, for he showed his ivories in a broad grin as he replied, ’Jess as you say, massa; you’se de boss in dis shanty.’

Directing the fire to be raked out, and the still to stand unused until it was repaired, the Colonel turned his horse to go, when he observed that the third negro was shoeless, and his feet chapped and swollen with the cold.  ‘Jake,’ he said, ‘where are your shoes?’

‘Wored out, massa.’

‘Worn out!  Why haven’t you been to me?’

’’Cause, massa, I know’d you’d jaw; you tole me I wears ’em out mighty fass.’

’Well, you do, that’s a fact; but go to Madam and get a pair; and you, June, you’ve been a decent nigger, you can ask for a dress for Rosey.  How is little June?’

‘Mighty pore, massa; de ma’am war dar lass night and dis mornin’, and she reckun’d he’s gwine to gwo sartain.’

‘Sorry to hear that,’ said the Colonel.  I’ll go and see him.  Don’t feel badly, June,’ he continued, for the tears welled up to the eyes of the black man as he spoke of his child; ‘we all must die.’

‘I knows dat, massa, but it am hard to hab em gwo.’

‘Yes, it is, June, but we may save him.’

‘Ef you cud, massa!  Oh, ef you cud!’ and the poor darky covered his face with his great hands and sobbed like a child.

We rode on to another ‘still,’ and there dismounting, the Colonel explained to me the process of gathering and manufacturing turpentine.  The trees are ‘boxed’ and ‘tapped’ early in the year, while the frost is still in the ground.  ‘Boxing’ is the process of scooping a cavity in the trunk of the tree by means of a peculiarly shaped axe, made for the purpose; ‘tapping’ is scarifying the rind of the wood above the boxes.  This is never done until the trees have been worked one season, but it is then repeated year after year, till on many plantations they present the marks of twenty and frequently thirty annual ‘tappings,’ and are often denuded of bark for a distance of thirty feet from the ground.  The necessity for this annual tapping arises from the fact that the scar on the trunk heals at the end of a season, and the sap will no longer run from it; a fresh wound is therefore made each spring.  The sap flows down the scarified surface and collects in the boxes, which are emptied six or eight times in a year, according to the length of the season.  This is the process of ‘dipping,’ and it is done with a tin or iron vessel constructed to fit the cavity in the tree.