A "terribly-strange bed" indeed was the old
four-poster, which swayed and shrieked at the slightest touch, and
myriad the enemies which there lay in wait for our blood. We were not
murdered, however, nor did our unseen foes--as had once been predicted
by a Cracker friend--_quite_ "eat us plum up, bodaciously alive." In
the early morning we fled, though not until we had seen how beautiful a
home the old plantation once had been. These were not Crackers among
whom we had passed the night, but the "native and best." Not a fair
specimen of this class, surely, but such as here and there, in the
remoter corners of the South, are breeding such troubles as may well
become a grave problem to the statesman--the legitimate outgrowth of
the old regime. War-orphaned, untutored, unrestrained, contemning
legitimate authority, spending the intervals of jail-life in wild
revels and wilder crimes,--such were the men in whose ruined home we
had passed the night.
There was yet one more morning among the gorgeous-foliaged
"scrub-hills," one more gypsy meal by a lakeside, one more genial
welcome to a hospitable Cracker board, and we were at home again in the
wide sea of pines which stretches to the St.
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