[Illustration: _The Talk at Dr. Fuller’s Plantation.—Page 102._] The scene was a striking one. In front of us was the old church; behind, the new school-house. Half a dozen superb live-oaks spread their gnarled branches over us, the silvery, pendulous streamers of Spanish moss floating down and flecking with the sunlight the upturned faces of the great congregation of negroes, while the breezes made mournful music among the leaves, and the mocking-birds sent back a livelier refrain. The little valley between the platform and the church was densely packed with negroes, all standing, and, as the Deacon told us, “eagah fur de Wud.” They clustered, too, about the platform, leaned over the railing, behind, and at the sides, and spread away in all directions, among the carts and wagons, that formed a sort of outer line of works, shutting in the scene. The coats were of every color, and cut, and age. There were a few straw hats on the heads of the younger females, and cotton gloves, gaudy calico dresses and crinolines were abundant; but the older ones clung to the many-colored handkerchiefs, wound turban-wise about the head, and affected gowns that clung closely to their _not_ graceful figures. Altogether they were dressed as well as the average of day-laborers’ families at the North would be, but in a taste that even such Northern families would pronounce barbarous. A quaint old African, clad in cotton checks, and bowed with many years of cotton hoeing, stepped out on the platform, when all the party had been seated. Leaning, like a patriarch, on his cane, and gently swaying his body to and fro over it, as if to keep time, he struck up, in a shrill, cracked voice, a curiously monotonous melody, in which, in a moment, the whole congregation were energetically joining. For the first time I observed, what had often been told me (though I had never before realized it), that the language of these sea islanders (and I am told that, to some extent, the same is true of the majority of plantation hands in South Carolina), is an almost unintelligible _patois_. Listening carefully to the swaying old leader, I found it impossible, for a time, to make out his meaning; and the vocal contortions to which the simplest words seemed to subject him, was a study that would have amazed a phonetic lecturer. The words were those of an old song, which our soldiers found them singing shortly after the fall of Bay Point: “Ma-a-a-assa Fullah a sittin’ on de tree ob life; Ma-a-a-assa Fullah a sittin’ on de tree ob life, Roll, Jordan, roll. Ma-a-a-assa Fullah a sittin’ on de tree ob life, Roll, Jordan, roll. Ma-a-a-assa Fullah a sittin’ on de tree ob life, Ro-o-oll, Jordan, roll, Ro-o-oll, Jordan, roll, Ro-o-oll, Jordan, roll.”