"Oh, because people are settled in such a scattering way they can't have schools. All the land that's good for any thing is taken up for large estates. And, then, these poor folks that are scattered up and down in between, it's nobody's business to attend to them, and they can't attend to themselves; and so they grow up, and nobody knows how they live, and everybody seems to think it a pity they are in the world. I've seen those sometimes that would be glad to do something, if they could find anything to do. Planters don't want them on their places—they'd rather have their own servants. If one of them wants to be a blacksmith, or a carpenter, there's no encouragement. Most of the large estates have their own carpenters and blacksmiths. And there's nothing for them to do, unless it is keeping dogs to hunt negroes; or these little low stores where they sell whiskey, and take what's stolen from the plantations. Sometimes a smart one gets a place as overseer on a plantation. Why, I've heard of their coming so low as actually to sell their children to traders, to get a bit of bread."

"What miserable creatures! But do you suppose it can be possible that a woman of any respectable family can have married a man of this sort?"

"Well, I don't know, Miss Nina; that might be. You see, good families sometimes degenerate; and when they get too poor to send their children off to school, or keep any teachers for them, they run down very fast. This man is not bad-looking, and he really is a person who, if he had had any way opened to him, might have been a smart man, and made something of himself and family; and when he was young and better-looking, I shouldn't wonder if an uneducated girl, who had never been off a plantation, might have liked him; he was fully equal, I dare say, to her brothers. You see, Miss Nina, when money goes, in this part of the country, everything goes with it; and when a family is not rich enough to have everything in itself, it goes down very soon."

"At any rate, I pity the poor things," said Nina. "I don't despise them, as Aunt Nesbit does."

Here Nina, observing the path clear and uninterrupted for some distance under the arching pines, struck her horse into a canter, and they rode on for some distance without speaking. Soon the horse's feet splashed and pattered on the cool, pebbly bottom of a small, shallow stream, which flowed through the woods. This stream went meandering among the pines like a spangled ribbon, sometimes tying itself into loops, leaving open spots—almost islands of green—graced by its waters. Such a little spot now opened to the view of the two travellers. It was something less than a quarter of an acre in extent, entirely surrounded by the stream, save only a small neck of about four feet, which connected it to the main-land.