158 SUCCESS WITH SMALL FRUITS. 



background of half-grown pines, motley forms and groups 

 were moving to and fro, some seeking the "■ buyers " with 

 full trays, others returning to their stations in the field with 

 a new supply of empty baskets. Some of the pickers were 

 drifting away to other fields, a few seeking work late in the 

 day ; m.ore, bargaining with the itinerant venders of pies, 

 made to last all summer if not sold, gingerbread, " pones," 

 and other nondescript edibles, at which an ostrich would 

 hesitate in well-grounded fear of indigestion, but for which 

 sable and semi-sable pickers exchange their berry tickets 

 and pennies as eagerly as we buy Vienna rolls. Two or 

 three barouches and buggies that had brought visitors were 

 mingled with the mule-carts ; and grouped together for a 

 moment might be seen elegantly attired ladies from New 

 York, slender mulatto girls, clad in a single tattered gown 

 which scantily covered their bare ankles and feet, and stout, 

 shiny negro women, their waists tied with a string to prevent 

 their flowing drapery from impeding their work. Flitting 

 to and fro were numberless colored children, bare-headed, 

 bare-legged, and often with not a little of their sleek bodies 

 gleaming through the innumerable rents of their garments, 

 their eyes glittering like black beads, and their white teeth 

 showing on the slightest provocation to mirth. Indeed, the 

 majority of the young men and women were chattering and 

 laughing much of the time, and only those well in the 

 shadow of age worked on in a stolid, plodding manner. 

 Mingled indiscriminately with the colored people were not a 

 few white women and children, and occasionally a white 

 man. As a rule, these were better dressed, the white girls 

 wearing sun-bonnets of portentous size, whose cavernous 

 depths would make a search for beauty on the part of our 

 artist a rather close and embarrassing scrutiny. The colored 

 women as often wore a man's hat as any other, and occa- 



