400 negro women live in more or less permanent concubinage with white men, while “there are thirty-two negro dives operated for white patronage”; nor does it seem that this state of things is at all exceptional. On the other hand, the feeling against such connections is certainly growing, and finds expression on every hand. The New Orleans Times Democrat, for instance, declares it to be a public scandal that no law against miscegenation should be on the statute-book of Louisiana, “and that it should be left to mobs to break up the miscegenatious couples.” Mr. Baker is, however, able to say that “the class of white men who consort with negro women is of a much lower sort than it was five or ten years ago.”

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VIII IN THE BLACK BELT

For a whole long hot summer’s day I journeyed down the Mississippi Valley from Memphis to Vicksburg, stopping at every wayside station. Here I first felt—what was afterwards to grow upon me every day—an impression of the extraordinary potential wealth of the South. These fat champains, many of them scarcely reclaimed from the wilderness, and few of them subjected to more than a rough surface culture, seemed to me to reek of fertility and to cry aloud for development. As scenery they were monotonous enough, but as the seed-plot of an illimitable future they were vastly impressive.

There was no dining-car on the train, and at Clarksville, at 12.30, we were allowed twenty minutes for “dinner.” We rushed for the dingy refreshment-room, and found at each place a plate of soup, surrounded by little saucers containing a cube of butter, a sort of dough-nut in syrup, and some lettuce with a slice of hard-boiled egg. There was also at each place a coffee-cup, a small milk-pot, and some sugar. The soup-plates 68were removed by being piled in the middle of the table; a negro waiter came round with fresh plates, and then served the following menu, all dumped successively upon a single plate: (1) chunks of boiled bacon with sauerkraut; (2) stewed veal; (3) mashed potatoes; (4) baked beans; (5) roast chicken; (6) boiled beef. The meal ended with pumpkin pie and ice-cream; and for beverage you had your choice of either coffee or iced-tea. For this refection the charge was seventy-five cents, or three shillings—the regular tariff, it would seem, at roadside stations. Moral: Never, if you can help it, take a train without a dining-car.

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Approaching Vicksburg, we ran for miles and leagues through a lovely region of luxuriantly green, vine-tangled forest, 

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