There is a population of about four hundred negroes on the three divisions of the plantation, this number including both sexes and every age and shade of color. All of the older set, with few exceptions, were the slaves of their employer, and did not leave him even in the restless and excited hour of their emancipation. Born on the place, they have spent the whole of their long lives there, and consider it to be as much their home as it is that of its owner. In fact, the negroes here are remote from those influences that lead so many others to migrate. The plantation is eighteen miles from a railroad and forty from a town, and is set down in a very sparsely settled country that has been only partially cleared of its forests. It has a teeming population of its own, which satisfies the social instincts of its inhabitants as much as if they were collected together in a small town. In consequence of all these facts, and in spite of the new state of things which the war produced, there survives in its confines something of that baronial spirit which we observe on a landed estate in England at the present day, where every man, woman, and child is accustomed to think of the landlord as the fountain-head of power and benefits. A similar spirit of loyal subordination prevails particularly among the oldest inhabitants of the plantation, who were once the absolute chattels of its owner, and who look upon that fact as creating an obligation in him to support them in their decrepitude. Being too far in the sere and yellow leaf to work, they are provided every month with enough rations to meet their wants, and in total idleness they calmly await the inevitable hour when their bones will be laid beside those of their fathers. There are few more picturesque figures than are many of these old negroes, who passed the heyday of their strength before they were freed, and who, born in slavery, survived to a new era only to find themselves in the last stages of old age. They are regarded by their race with as much veneration as if they were invested with the authority of prophets and seers. Some of them, in spite of their years, act occasionally as preachers, and are listened to with awe and trepidation as they lift up their trembling voices in exhortation or denunciation. As travellers from a distant past, it is interesting to observe them sitting with bent backs and hands resting on their sticks in the door-ways of their cabins on bright days in summer, or by the warm firesides in winter, while members of younger generations talk around them or play about their knees.