Amid all this transition from land-owner to tenant there is, besides the corn-raiser, one other steadfast figure, undisturbed by change of relation or condition, holding tenaciously to what it has, though little inclined to push for more. This is Cuffee, the darky farmer. There is no more interesting study in our agriculture than this same dusky, good-natured fellow—humble, patient, shrewd—as he drives into town with his mixed team and his one bag of cotton, on which, drawn by a sympathetic sense of ownership, his whole family is clustered. Living simply and frugally, supplementing his humble meal with a ’possum caught in the night hunt, or a rabbit shot with the old army musket that he captured from some deserted battle-field, and allowing no idlers in the family save the youngsters who “tend de free school,” he defies alike the usurer and the land-shark. In the State of Georgia he owns 680,000 acres of land, cut up into farms that barely average ten acres each, and in the Cotton States he owns 2,680,800 acres, similarly divided. From this possession it is impossible to drive him, and to this possession he adds gradually as the seasons go by. He is not ambitious, however, to own large tracts of land, preferring the few acres that he has constantly under his eye, and to every foot of which he feels a rude attachment. The relations of the negro to cotton are peculiar. Although he spends the most of his life in the cotton field, and this staple is the main crop with which he is concerned, it does not enter into his social life, catch his sentiment, or furnish the occasion for any of his pleasures. None of his homely festivals hinge upon the culture or handling of the great staple. He has his corn-shuckings, his log-rollings, his quilting bees, his threshing jousts, and indeed every special work about the farm is made to yield its element of frolic, except the making of cotton. None of those tuneful melodies with which he beguiles his work or gladdens his play-time acknowledge cotton as a subject or an incident. None of the folklore with which the moonlight nights are whiled away or the fire-lit cabins sanctified, and which finds its home in the corn patch or the meadows, has aught to do with the cotton field. I have never heard a negro song in which the cotton field is made the incidental theme or the subject of allusion, except in a broken perversion of that incomparable ballad, “The Mocking-Bird,” in which the name of the heroine, the tender sentiment, and the tune, which is a favorite one with the negroes, are preserved. This song, with the flower of Southern girlhood that points the regretful tenderness changed into a dusky maiden idealized by early death, with the “mocking-bird singing o’er her grave,” and sung in snatches almost without words or coherence, is popular with the field hands in many parts of the South.