Individual plantation holdings vary in size from the thirty thousand acres of Bell, the central Alabama planter, down to fifty acres. Many large owners have scattered plantations, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty, each carried on by itself; or two or three adjacent groups under one manager. You are informed that the X brothers "own thirty-three plantations," which probably means thirty-three different large farms, ranging from two hundred to two thousand acres each. Three to five thousand acres of land under cultivation is as large a body of land as seems advantageous to handle together. A fair example of the large plantation in the best cotton lands is the estate managed by Mr. Dayton near Jonesville, La., on the Tensas and Little rivers. It is an expanse of that incredibly rich land, of which there are millions of acres in this enormous delta, land which has in many places produced fifty to seventy-five successive crops of cotton without an ounce of fertilizer. Between the rivers, which are fenced off by levees, lie the fields, originally all wooded, but in these old plantations even the roots have disappeared from the open fields, although wherever the plantation is enlarged the woods have to be cleared, and the gaunt and fire-scarred dead trunks mark the progress of cultivation. The negro houses stand in the middle of the field; for on modern plantations it is very rare to gather the hands in quarters near the great house; their cabins are distributed all over the estate. On the main road is a manager's house, distinctly better than any of the negro cabins. Near by a white family is moving in where a black family has moved out, for this plantation (though the thing is uncommon) has a few white hands working alongside the Negroes. In this free open, in the breadth of the fields and the width of the turbid streams, alongside the endless procession of scenic forests in the background, one forgets the long hot days of toil, the scanty living, the ignorance and debasement. It may all be as sordid as the mines or the iron works, but it is in pure air. These thousands of broad acres with their mealy brown soil bearing the "cotton-weed" (the common name for the stalk after the cotton is picked) are a type of the lowland South from Texas to North Carolina.