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to the advantage of the employer of free labour at the present rate of wages, and goes to prove that the freedman is at the present rate underpaid, not being paid sufficient (according to the old scale of living befitting a slave) to allow him to provide for illness, and old age, and the bringing up of his children. If this be so, the prospect is not good for the planter, as with a falling market his scale of wages will have to rise.

In the night we passed a part of the forest in which the farmer was burning the dead trees on his clearing. The effect by night was very beautiful; the tall dead trunks are all aglow and sparkling from top to root. The ordinary mode of clearing forest land is after this fashion :-You cut what timber you require for log-hut and fences. But labour is precious; and for the rest, you destroy it in the way which gives you least trouble. Each tree is notched round the foot with an axe. In from two to three years the branches and bark have fallen off, and the timber is rotten nearly to the heart. Then fire is set to the root, and the tree blazes from butt to bough until reduced to ashes. The hard stumps are not sufficiently decayed for burning until two or three more years have passed; but, in the meantime, the farmer ploughs tortuously in and out among the stumps, and raises crops from the soil. Machines have been invented in prosperous parts

of the States, which extract the old stumps as dentists take out decayed teeth.

Jan. 25, '67, Friday.

Sat down next to a fellow-passenger on his way home to Texas. As we advanced, the forest became more and more densely filled with cane-brake and undergrowth of evergreens. Here and there magnolias appeared almost of the size of forest trees. 'It is a sign of a mighty poor soil,' said my friend, 'where magnolias grow. You find them mostly on sandy bluffs, but not far from water.' Montgomery to Mobile by rail is 126 miles; by steamboat and the Alabama river it is 333. We decided in favour of the rail, preferring speed to ease and river scenery; and congratulated ourselves upon our decision, as to-day we had a great amount of heavy, soft, warm spring rain.

At several of the stations we passed this morning were assembled groups of migratory negro families, working their way westward, their luggage consisting generally of a bed rolled up, a bundle, and half a barrel of potatoes. The first effect of freedom is a great feeling of restlessness, a desire to leave the old home and see the world. Thirty-seven thousand negroes, according to newspaper estimates, have left South Carolina already, travelling west. The meaning of the Indian name Alabama is said to be Here we

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rest,' but the migratory negro still moves on westward towards Mississippi and Texas. The quicker he moves, the better,' say the Southern newspapers; we must have white labour now.' How are they to get it? It is too much to expect of the Northern Government that they will divert emigration and cotton from the North in order to help the South; but what seems to be wanted is a line of steamers running from the South to the European ports of emigration, say from Charleston and Savanna to Liverpool and Hamburgh. These would carry the cotton direct to Europe, instead of its passing through the hands of the New York brokers, and would return with emigrants direct to the South, instead of their landing at New York and going off to the West. Such a line of steamers will never be started except by a Government subsidy. American speculators will speculate in anything except lines of steamers. But will emigrants come merely to supply an under-stocked labour-market, in a land of bankrupt landlords? To attract emigrants, you must subdivide plantations, and offer land for sale. The impoverished emigrant, when he lands in America, may profess himself a radical; but his desire is to possess land, and at heart he is simply an unbloated aristocrat without the slightest intention of working for anybody except himself. He has had enough experience of that; his object is to obtain land of his own.

The idea seems to be spreading that it would be well if greater facilities could be established for education in the South, instead of having to seek it in the New England States. The money made in the South used to be spent in the North; for which reason, among many others, the South has always been short of the money requisite for the development of her railroads and manufactures. And one good reason for going North was to get your children educated, although there were a certain amount of good schools in the South for the higher class of education. They are talking now of establishing a University in some healthy upland position in Alabama, and there is a notice in to-day's paper of a meeting to be held at Galveston, to consider the best position for a Texas State University. If there were money enough in the South to ensure liberal payment, it would not be a bad speculation for men well recommended from the English Universities to open colleges in these parts. I think they would be very well received.

Texas, according to my fellow-passenger, is the most prosperous State in the South. At the beginning of last year, Galveston, its chief port, contained 8,000 inhabitants; and at the present time contains 20,000; and the rest of the State is supposed to have nearly doubled its population in the course of the year. For emigrants the fare from Liverpool to Galveston is about 40 dollars gold, or £9. My

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informant keeps two English maid-servants, and pays them each 25 dollars gold, or £5 a month.

We stopped to dine at a depot, or station in the woods, where the beef collops, judging by their shape and hardness, must have been cut off the animal with an axe. Gas not being at hand, in front of the station, where the platform should have been, were two rough tables covered with about three inches of earth, on which at night they lit fires of pine knots. As we drew towards the end of our journey, the depots were defended by stockades against raiders from Pensacola, where during the war the North held possession of the navy yard.

At Blakesley the railway came to a most abrupt and unexpected end on the bank of the Alabama river, and we were shipped on board a great white steamboat, the first of the American river steamboats we have seen. Ours, being a comparatively small boat, was a huge flat barge, on which was erected only a one-storied block of buildings. On the ground floor we carried the engine, the fire-wood, cotton and

sugar, horses and pigs, and the negroes. The upper story is a long saloon running the length of the vessel, with a row of cabins containing berths, opening out of the saloon on either side. At each end and on either side of this upper story is a veranda running Here you sit and

round, as on the houses on land.

smoke, while the banks glide past you, watching the