American country-life can hardly again be so picturesque as it was on some of the plantations of Virginia in my young days. The cavalcades of huntsmen returning with a fox-brush in the cap of the foremost rider, or counting their partridges on the porch before the ladies--partridges being the birds known as quails in the North; the riding in the great carriage to church, surrounded by a retinue on horseback; the coming and going of company to spend the day, which meant from noon till twilight; the gathering of the rose-leaves to be dried and sprinkled over the table- and bed-linen for the odor they imparted;--an atmosphere whose charm cannot be reproduced envelopes these scenes of the far-away past. The chief agricultural event of the year in the region where I lived was the harvesting of the grain. All the laboring white men who could be of service were employed with the slaves at such times. Their dinners were eaten at long tables under the trees, with a tub of iced toddy or mint-julep in the shade near by. Supper, when the day's work was done, brought hot coffee, rolls and biscuits, and a dance on the grass to the music of fiddle and banjo closed the scene at bedtime. The long lines of "cradlers," following their leader and laying the golden swaths smoothly across hill and valley, were a sight which was lost with keen regret by me. I shall never forget when the first reaping-machine came clattering into the wheat-fields, sounding the knell of all that was most pleasing in the harvest-time. What a commotion that first reaper made! A certain distinguished Senator of the United States--I think he was then Speaker of the House--came from afar to witness its operations and to consider its introduction on his own rather unproductive plantation. After silently taking in its movements, his hands meditatively in his pockets and his chin buried solemnly in his neckcloth, he turned away in disgust, with a comment that was brief and to the point: "Wouldn't have such a d----d _fast_ thing on my place!" Much of the distrust, however, with which improved utensils were regarded had a better reason. Complicated and delicate machines in the hands of plantation negroes were too much like "all the modern improvements" in the terrible hands of Biddy.