perhaps swiftly done, yet after all life--this was the message of it
all. The trees grew vast and tall. The corn, where the stalks could
still be seen, grew stiff and strong as little trees. The cotton,
through which the negroes rode, their black kinky heads level with
the old shreds of ungathered bolls, showed plants rank and coarse
enough to uphold a man's weight free of the ground. This sun and this
soil--what might they not do in brooding fecundity? Growth,
reproduction, the multifold--all this was written under that sky
which now swept, deep and blue, flecked here and there with soft and
fleecy clouds, over these fruitful acres hewn from the primeval
forest.

The forest, the deep, vast forest of oak and ash and gum and ghostly
sycamore; the forest, tangled with a thousand binding vines and
briers, wattled and laced with rank blue cane--sure proof of a soil
exhaustlessly rich--this ancient forest still stood, mysterious and
forbidding, all about the edges of the great plantation. Here and
there a tall white stump, fire-blackened at its foot, stood, even in
fields long cultivated, showing how laborious and slow had been the
whittling away of this jungle, which even now continually encroached
and claimed its own. The rim of the woods, marked white by the
deadened trees where the axes of the laborers were reclaiming yet
other acres as the years rolled by, now showed in the morning sun
distinctly, making a frame for the rich and restful picture of the
Big House and its lands. Now and again overhead there swung slowly an
occasional great black bird, its shadow not yet falling straight on
the sunlit ground, as it would at midday, when the puppies of the
pack would begin their daily pastime of chasing it across the fields.

This silent surrounding forest even yet held its ancient creatures--