This great impediment being removed, one formidable difficulty still remained in the way of the rice planters, and that was the threshing of the crop by flail.  The labor requisite to accomplish this was so great, that we once heard a distinguished planter say, while having one large crop threshed out by flail, that he would regard another large crop as a calamity.  Previous to 1830 threshing mills had been tried by various individuals, but with no apparent success.  In that year the attempt was renewed, and we were present and witnessed the first trial of a thresher, constructed in New York, and which was tested on Savannah river, under the auspices of General Hamilton.  The machinery was driven by apparatus similar to that employed for driving the cotton gin.  The result was not very satisfactory, but there was ground for hope, and after an outlay of very large sums, and after many disappointments, the happy expedient was thought of, of testing the mill with steam instead of animal power.  The experiment was completely successful, and it was manifest at once that the difficulties had not been in the imperfect construction, of the thresher, but in the insufficiency of the moving power.

It is now twenty years since we witnessed the working of the small mill alluded to, and the rice threshing-mill, with steam-engine attached, is now a splendid piece of operative machinery.  The rice in sheaf is taken up to the thresher by a conveyor, it is threshed, the straw taken off, then thrice winnowed and twice screened, and the result in some cases exceeds a thousand bushels of clean rough rice, the work of a short winter day.

Humanity rejoices at these inventions—­at this transfer to water and steam, of processes so slow and so exhausting to the human as well as to the animal frame—­and in this feeling we are confident every planter deeply sympathises.  Moreover, the relief they have afforded in other respects has been perfectly indescribable.  Previous to these improvements all the finer portions of the winter were appropriated exclusively to the milling and the threshing of the crop with the flail, yet it is manifest they added not one particle to the value of the property; indeed, while going on, all other work, and all preparation for another crop had to be suspended, so that the condition of the plantation was not progressive, but retrograde.

A short recapitulation will show what has been accomplished by the enterprise of our planters in the last seventy years.  At the close of the Revolution it is believed the rice fields were poorly drained, and when broken up were chiefly turned with the hoe, then trenched with the hoe; then came three or four hoeings and as many pickings.  The rice was then cut with the sickle and carried in on the head, then threshed with the flail, then milled and dressed, in some cases wholly by human