"If a tenant sees that other Negroes on the same plantation have been able to save money and get land of their own, it tends to make them more industrious. It pays the planter to treat his tenants well." _Negro with $1,000 in the Bank_ The result is that a number of Mr. Brown's tenants have bought and own good farms near the greater plantation. The plantation, indeed, becomes a sort of central sun around which revolves like planets the lesser life of the Negro landowner. Mr. Brown told me with no little pride of the successes of several Negroes. We met one farmer driving to town in a top buggy with a Negro school-teacher. His name was Robert Polhill--a good type of the self-respecting, vigorous, industrious Negro. Afterward we visited his farm. He had an excellent house with four rooms. In front there were vines and decorative "chicken-corn"; a fence surrounded the place and it was really in good repair. Inside the house everything was scrupulously neat, from the clean rag rugs to the huge post beds with their gay coverlets. The wife evidently had some Indian blood in her veins; she could read and write, but Polhill himself was a full black Negro, intelligent, but illiterate. The children, and there were a lot of them, are growing up practically without opportunity for education because the school held in the Negro church is not only very poor, but it is in session only a short time every year. Near the house was a one-horse syrup-mill then in operation, grinding cane brought in by neighbouring farmers--white as well as black--the whites thus patronising the enterprise of their energetic Negro neighbour. "I first noticed Polhill when he began work on the plantation," said Mr. Brown, "because he was the only Negro on the place whom I could depend upon to stop hog-cracks in the fences." His history is the common history of the Negro farmer who "gets ahead." Starting as a wages' hand, he worked hard and steadily, saving enough finally to buy a mule--the Negro's first purchase; then he rented land, and by hard work and close calculating made money steadily. With his first $75 he started out to see the world, travelling by railroad to Florida, and finally back home again. The "moving about" instinct is strong in all Negroes--sometimes to their destruction. Then he bought 100 acres of land on credit and having good crops, paid for it in six or seven years. Now he has a comfortable home, he is out of debt, and has money in the bank, a painted house, a top buggy and a cabinet organ! These are the values of his property: His farm is worth $2,000 Two mules 300 Horse 150 Other equipment 550 Money in the bank 1,000 ------ $4,000 _Negro Who Owns 1,000 Acres of Land_