The only carts which are used upon the plantations are very clumsily made; a flat surface or table (_meza_) made of thick and heavy timber, of about two feet and a half broad, and six feet in length, is fixed upon two wheels of solid timber, with a moveable axle-tree; a pole is likewise fixed to the cart. These vehicles are always drawn by four oxen or more, and as they are narrow, and the roads upon which they must travel are bad, they are continually overturning. The negroes who drive the carts have generally some indulgencies, with which their fellow-slaves are not favoured, from the greater labour which this business requires, and from the continual difficulty and danger to which they are exposed, owing to the overturning of the carts and the unruliness of the oxen. In the whole management of the concerns of a plantation, the want of mechanical assistance to decrease the labour of the workmen must strike every person who is in the habit of seeing them, and of paying any attention to the subject. I will mention one instance; when bricks or tiles are to be removed from one place to another, the whole gang of negroes belonging to the estate is employed in carrying them; each man takes three or perhaps four bricks or tiles upon his head, and marches off gently and quietly; he lays them down where he is desired so to do, and again returns for three or four more. Thus thirty persons sometimes pass the whole day in doing the same quantity of work that two men with wheel-barrows would have performed with equal ease in the same space of time. CHAPTER XVII. AGRICULTURE.—COTTON.