which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord. At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers, who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then, after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream. The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and the droves of cattle. But for Georgia and the Negro there set in the twilight of ruin and disillusion. Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors, and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the race of human individuals striving one against another. “No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it. We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced. It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibility of picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.