Plantation Minstrelsy

I have just been down in the valley of the Mississippi - away out in the lowlands of Louisiana, where the sugar cane grows and the country grows so green and beautiful in the springtime. I go there annually a little later than this and put in several months at that season of the year when the trees are budding and the ground is growing over with a verdant carpet and the birds are singing to a charm, and I teil you there is no more tempting land, no more reposeful and dreamy región to be found anywhere. But, as I was going on to say, one finds many of the old time musicians there on the great cotton and sugar plantations. The old fellows have the air and manner of the barons of the old south they used to be. They were reared in luxury and ease and have never known a care, it would seem. You sometimes find them sitting on the verandas oí their great white houses surrounded by the tall columns that tower up, and amid a world of fragrant fiowers - just sltting out there in their shirt sleeves, or with some light coat on basking iu the sunHght and singing the old-time songs, vhile away off yonder in the fields the darkies are singing too, while they work. It is a picture one never forgets when he has once seen it. Some how the air down there in the early springtime seems to have some sort of narcotic in it, for it makes a fellow féel as sleepy and drotsy and dreamy and at perfect peace with the world as a clime could make him feel.