So the Colonial Cavaliers found trouble in their households with servants of any race or color, and the gentle nature of the blacks proving specially adaptable to servitude, and purchase money seeming so much less than wage-money, they gradually did away with other service. Every plantation had its negro-quarters, where crowds of pickaninnies swarmed in the sunshine outside the little cabins with scarcely more clothing on than their parents had worn in their African jungle. The bread of Indian corn was baked on the hoe over a smoky fire, or in the ashes. When the day's work was done, the negroes sat, with their banjos or rude musical instruments, playing accompaniments to their strange, weird music, a mixture of reminiscences of barbarism and the hymns they caught from the "New Lights"; or they spent the evening more merrily, dancing jigs to the twanging of a broken fiddle. They were, on the whole, a careless, happy race, taking no thought for the morrow, content to accept food and clothing at the hands of "Massa and Missus," and, for the rest, to work when they must, shirk when they could, and carry a merry heart through life. The outward circumstances of their lot were hard. Anbury, in his American travels, observed their condition closely and described it with what we must believe impartial accuracy. The life of these field-hands was much more severe than that of the household servants, both because the work itself was harder, and because it was ruled by the overseer, usually a brute. It is of these field negroes that Anbury is writing, when he says: "They are called up at daybreak, and seldom allowed to swallow a mouthful of hominy or hoecake, but are driven out into the field immediately, where they continue at hard labor without intermission till noon, when they go to their dinners and are seldom allowed an hour for that purpose. Their meals consist of hominy and salt, and if their master is a man of humanity, touched by the finer feelings of love and sensibility, he allows them twice a week a little fat, skimmed milk, rusty bacon or salt herring to relish this miserable and scanty fare.... After they have dined they return to labor in the field till dusk in the evening. Here one naturally imagines the daily labor of these poor creatures over; not so. They repair to the tobacco-houses, where each has a task of _stripping_ allotted, which takes up some hours; or else they have such a quantity of Indian corn to husk, and if they neglect it, are tied up in the morning, and receive a number of lashes from those unfeeling monsters, the overseers. When they lay themselves down to rest, their comforts are equally miserable and limited, for they sleep on a bench, or on the ground with an old scanty blanket, which serves them at once for bed and covering. Their clothing is not less wretched, consisting of a shirt and trousers of coarse, thin, hard, hempen stuff in the Summer, with an addition of a very coarse woolen jacket, breeches, and shoes in