Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff, and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none the less pleasant for that. There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them. The men wore loin cloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way. “It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations, taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and given the full rights of white American citizens.” The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it under the dominance of a free Negro majority. “You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t progress any further.” “Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges have arisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will arrive.”