Then we all went to breakfast, the Misses Bruce both fresh as dewy wood-flowers, and Mrs. Judge Pennoyer radiating amiability. Only the head commissary and the section contractor were thought of sufficient social importance to breakfast with us, and the former from his stores brought many delicacies in cans and bottles. Then after breakfast we went to walk--the ladies with sunshades and gloves--upon the location; a broad swath cut through the rolling forest and undulating far as the eye could reach in either direction, dotted with men and mules. Ahead, they were still blowing out stumps with gunpowder and dragging them away; where we stood was being built an embankment of gravel; and they were dragging out gravel from the “cut” ahead and heaping it upon the long mound. I gave my hand to Miss Jeanie and helped her up. Each black negro worked with a splendid mule; seventeen or eighteen hands high perhaps, dragging a curious sort of drag-spade, which the mule knew how to catch in the gravel, turn out full, drag the load evenly along, and then tip it out adroitly at the precise spot, a foot in front of the last dump; the negro hardly doing more than standing by to see the mule kept working; not, of course, working himself. Thus each man-laborer became an overseer, if only to a mule. “The mule’s the finer animal of the two,” said Coe, “and much the more moral.” “But he’s got no vote,” grunted Jim. “Ef we didn’t keep them black Mississippi niggers up here off’m the farms, they’d swamp us all.” “Are they allowed to bring their wives to camp with them?” queried Miss Jeanie, softly; and, following her glance, we saw several coal-black damsels sitting in the warm sand-bank at the side of the cut, their finery about them, and evidently established there for the morning, basking in the sun. “Oh, yes, they bring up their wives,” said Healy, reluctantly. “If we didn’t, they’d run away every two or three days. Nothing a contractor dislikes so much as irregular labor.” “But it shows they have some good in them to be so devoted,” said Miss Jeanie. “We don’t all of us have emotions stronger than money-getting,” added I. “I don’t know about emotions,” said Tim. “There’s forty of their wives and eighteen hundred niggers, and every Saturday night they has a fight an’ a batch on ’em gets killed, an’ I know it’s terrible expensive on labor. Most as bad as moonshine.” “Have you got King Kelly, yet?” said Coe, in an undertone. “Hush!” hissed Captain Healy, dramatically. Just then I noticed a file of peculiarly idle negroes sauntering down the “right of way;” they had passed us once or twice before, and appeared to have no occupation. “See anythin’ peculiar about them niggers?” “They are very lazy,” said Coe. “They look like minstrels,” said Miss Jeanie.