Down this way, one was going about selling tickets to Kansas for five dollars down, and four upon arrival. In one place he took in some forty of his confiding brethren. Some came to the railroad agent, my informant, to learn of the cheat. Others, at another place, had got on board to find that their tickets were a sham. Another black sharper, for one dollar and a half, was making out the papers for land which Queen Victoria was to give them, since Uncle Sam had failed on the “forty acres and a mule.” On the way, making one hundred miles north by hack to Austin, I had my desire satisfied in overtaking one of the great droves of cattle moving northward. It numbered three thousand. We struck them as they were passing across a valley, so that every creature was in view. A grand sight it was, preceded by the four-mule commissary prairie schooner, attended by the twenty cow-boys in saddle, with cracking whip and awful spurs, and with the relay of sixty horses in drove, each driver having a change of four. The dreadful drouth of the last year, which carried corn up to 25 cents a bushel, was apparent in the poverty-stricken quality of the beasts and in the scraping up of old scalawags and yearlings and two-year-olds to make out the drove. Out of three counties here last year, 25,000 horses were taken. These go in droves of from twelve to fifteen hundred. Multitudes of them, as they run from colts upward, are sold for five dollars each. Mine host, a colored man, while I was with him, sold eight head of broken horses for $155, to be paid next fall, without interest. In some droves, fifty sucking colts are sometimes shot in a day, as impediments of the march. The Parker farm has in it 24,000 acres. Six thousand of these are to be cultivated to raise grain for fattening the 4,000 cattle which are to be shipped by rail. Collins Campbell, Esq., twenty years from Vermont, has his 15,000 acres, with 7,000 fenced. I found him a stated reader of the AMERICAN MISSIONARY, and retaining those well-balanced sentiments which his own Green Mountains had bred. He sells land to the Freedmen. One of his neighbors, whose hospitality I enjoyed, is Gabriel Washington. I wonder if that archangel has not sufficient regard for “the Father of his Country,” and for this, its dusky citizen, to be pleased with this collocation of names? Our Gabriel is so much of the earth earthy, that he owns 1,260 acres of its soil, and has a model farm, with its orchard, cotton gin, and its big Yankee woodpile, the finest one I have seen in the South. His buxom wife had been down the day before, twelve miles, to our big meeting.