had never been discovered. The king of England did not like it, and he wrote a book to dissuade people from the use of tobacco; but every one went on smoking Virginia tobacco as before.

The company which sent colonists to Virginia promised fifty acres to any one who would clear the land and settle upon it; for a small sum of money one might buy a hundred acres; and if any one did some special service to the colony, he might receive a gift of as much as two thousand acres. Now, in England, to own land was to be thought much of. Only noblemen or country gentlemen could boast of having two thousand or a hundred or even fifty acres. So the Englishmen who came to Virginia, where land was plenty, were all eager to own great estates.

To carry on such estates, and especially to raise tobacco, required many laborers. It was not easy for the Virginia land-owners to bring these from English farms. They could not be spared by the farmers there, and besides, such laborers were for the most part men and women who had never been beyond the villages where they had been born and had hardly ever heard of America. They lived, father and son, in the same place, and knew little about any other. But in London and other cities of England there were, at the time when the Virginia colony was formed, many poor people who had no work and nothing to live If these people could be sent to America,

on.

not only would the cities be rid of them, but the gentlemen in the new country would have laborers to cut down trees, clear the fields, and plant tobacco.

Accordingly, many of these idle and poor people were sent over as servants. The Virginia planters paid their passage, sheltered, fed, and clothed them, and in return had the use of their labor for a certain number of years. The plan did not work very well, however. Often these "indentured servants," as they were called, were idle and unwilling to work that was one reason that they had been poor in London. Even when they did work, they were only "bound" for a certain length of time. After they had served their time, they were free. Then they sometimes cleared farms for themselves; but very often they led lazy, vicious lives, and were a trouble and vexation to the neighborhood.

It seemed to these Virginia planters that there was a better way. In 1619, a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, a Dutch captain brought up the James River twenty blacks whom he had captured on the coast of Africa. He offered to sell these to the planters, and they bought them. No one saw anything out of the way in this. It was no new thing to own slaves. There were slaves in the West India Islands, and in the countries of Europe. Indians when captured in war were sold into slavery. For that

matter, white men had been made slaves. The difference between these blacks and the indentured servants was that the planter who paid the Dutch captain for a black man had the use of him all his lifetime, but if he bought from an English captain the services of an indentured white man, he could only have those services for a few months or years. It certainly was much more convenient to have an African slave.

There were not many of these slaves at first. An occasional shipload was brought from Africa, but it was not until after fifty years that negroes made any considerable part of the population. They had families, and all the children were slaves like their parents. More were bought of captains who made a business of going to Africa to trade for slaves, just as they might have gone to the East Indies for spices. The plantations were growing larger, and the more slaves a man had, the more tobacco he could raise; the more tobacco he could raise, the richer he was. Until long after the year 1732, the people in Virginia were wont to reckon the cost of things, not by pounds, shillings, and pence- the English currency, but by pounds of tobacco — the Virginia currency. The salaries of the clergy were paid in tobacco; so were all their fees for christening, marrying, and burying. Taxes were paid and accounts were kept in tobacco. At a few points there were houses to which planters brought their tobacco,

and these warehouses served the purpose of banks. A planter stored his tobacco and received a certificate of deposit. This certificate he could use instead of a check on a bank.

The small planters who lived high up the rivers, beyond the point where vessels could go, floated their tobacco in boats down to one of the warehouses, where it made part of the cargo of some ship sailing for England. But the largest part of this produce was shipped directly from the great plantations. Each of these had its own storehouse and its own wharf. The Virginia planter was his own shipping merchant. He had his agent in London. Once a year, a vessel would make its way up the river to his wharf. It brought whatever he or his family needed. He had sent to his agent to buy clothes, furniture, table-linen, tools, medicine, spices, foreign fruits, harnesses, carriages, cutlery, wines, books, pictures, there was scarcely an article used in his house or on his plantation for which he did not send to London. Then in return he helped to load the vessel, and he had just one article with which to make up the cargo tobacco. Now and then tar, pitch, and turpentine were sent from some districts, but the Virginia planter rarely sent anything but tobacco to England in return for what he received.

CHAPTER II.

A VIRGINIA PLANTATION.

LET us visit in imagination one of these Virginia plantations, such as were to be found in 1732, and see what sort of life was led upon it.

To reach the plantation, one is likely to ride for some distance through the woods. The country is not yet cleared of the forest, and each planter, as he adds one tobacco-field to another, has to make inroads upon the great trees. Coming nearer, one rides past tracts where the underbrush is gone, but tall, gaunt trees stand, bearing no foliage and looking ready to fall to the ground. They have been girdled, that is, have had a gash cut around the trunk, through the bark, quite into the wood; thus the sap cannot flow, and the tree rots away, falling finally with a great crash. The luckless traveler sometimes finds his way stopped by one of these trees fallen across the road. By the border of these tracts are Virginia rail-fences, eight or ten feet in height, which zig zag in a curious fashion, -- the rails, twelve feet or so in length, not running into posts, but resting on one another at the ends, like a succession of W's. When the new land is wholly cleared