In the midst of a large, quadrangular space, flanked on three sides by double rows of negro-cabins, and on the fourth apparently sloping down to a water-course, was a rough sort of threshing-mill, now idle, but showing satisfactory results of its day's labor in a large heap of rice by its side. A crowd of negroes, of both sexes, coarsely and uncouthly clad, were busily filling odd, shallow baskets from this heap, which they then poised on their heads, and bore off down the slope to some unseen goal. There were two regular, silent files, the one coming, the other going; and the heap of grain steadily and even swiftly diminished. Near the mill, stood the only white person visible,--a large, powerfully-framed man, carelessly and even shabbily dressed, yet with the unmistakable air of ownership about him. At his left hand, a half-naked, impish looking negro boy was holding a blazing pitch-pine torch, by the light of which he seemed to be jotting down some sort of memoranda in a small book. The scene was even more strange and weird than picturesque. The dark figures of the negroes, filing noiselessly up the shadowed slope, suddenly grew distinct, wild, and fantastic, within the circle of enchantment made by the flaring light of the torch, only to become dim and spectral again when received back into the dusk. They might have passed for embodiments of those vagaries of the mind, which come from no one knows whither, play their fitful parts within the illuminated circle of the imagination, and vanish as they came. The young man would almost have taken it as a matter of course, had the whole spectacle suddenly melted into thin air. Yet, even in that case, he would have expected the masterful personage aforementioned to have remained, as the one tangible link between the phantasms and the earth. In truth, a single glance at his massive figure, which seemed to have been hewn out of the rock, rather than moulded from any softer material, went far to disenchant the scene. Here was a touch of the actual, the substantial, and the dogmatic, not to be mistaken; and serving as a clue to the reality of everything else. Toward this personage, after a moment's scrutiny, the young man unhesitatingly made his way, with the air of one who has found something certain amid much that is confused, illusory, and perplexing. He was immediately spied by the negroes, and followed by their curious gaze; albeit, they ventured not to intermit their labor for an instant, but contented themselves with slowly and stiffly turning their burdened heads toward him as they marched on, and keeping their shining black eyes fixed on him to the last, in such that the heads of the retreating file seemed to have been set on backwards. The boy with the torch was perhaps the most wondering, open-mouthed gazer of them all.