* * * * * “Where do you come from?” one of the party happened to ask a negro who had been employed for some trifling service. “From Charleston, sah. I b’longed to Massa Legree, uncle to the great lawyer.” Massa Legree had proved worthy of the name which an Abolition pen has made immortal. He had sold this man into Alabama fifteen years ago, and the gray-wooled fellow said that since then he had neither seen nor heard from wife or child. “But I’s much ’bliged to all the good gemmen and ladies as has helped us to freedom. We’ll all s’port oursel’s now, and I’s hope soon to hab money enough to go back and look for my old ’oman and babies.” The poor man seemed to have no comprehension of the fact that his babies of fifteen years ago were scarcely to be considered babies now. He was right about their supporting themselves. During the preceding month the military authorities had issued rations to the destitute Mobilians, white and black alike. To the master race no less than fifty-nine thousand rations had been given away by the Government they had been trying to subvert. Among the negroes only eleven thousand and eighty (or less than one-fifth as many,) had been needed. In June the number of destitute negroes had decreased till they were drawing only one-tenth as many rations daily as were required by the whites. A stranger might have concluded that it was the white race that was going to prove unable to take care of itself, instead of the emancipated slaves, over whose future, unless brightened by some vision of compulsory labor, their late loving masters grew so sad. The explanation was a simple one. The negroes had gone to work: it was the only way they knew for getting bread, except when the morals of slavery had taught them to steal, and for that there was now small chance. The whites had nobody left to go to work for them, and that was the only way to get bread _they_ knew. Throughout the city the negroes found plenty of employments. In the country they were already talking of clubbing together and working plantations. But I heard of no movement of this kind that promised success. They had been accustomed to obey a common master; relieved from his control, each one now wanted to set up for master on his own account, and “boss” the rest. There was little doubt that they would make enough to keep from starving; but there was no prospect of their doing much more. Large cotton crops were not to be expected from any plantation which negroes controlled.