Beadle's Dime Novels No. 33: Maum Guinea and Her Plantation Children — page 113: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Cd THE FIDDLE A*D BONFIRE. 205 hunt. Seldom had there been so merry a Christmas time as this, some of whose events we are recording The planters generally had cut and ground a tolerable crop, and were disposed to humor the slaves who had toiled eighteen hours out of ‘the twenty-four, during “grinding-season.” The weather had been propitious; not a rainy day, so far; the air cool and bracing, the days and nights calm and bright. The whole country, black and white, seemed determined to enjoy itself to an amount of social pleasure which should EE ESM. Sutin the year. - ‘ The light and music which Streamed from Judge Bell's mansion, on Monday night, was reflected back from the fiddle and bonfire which made echo in a distant part of his planta- tion. A group of negro men, field-hands the most of them, were gathered around a huge fire, at which an opossum and a pig were roasting. There were no women present, and consequently, no dancing ; but one of them had a fiddle, and with the universal loye for music which characterizes them, they interspersed their wild and often silly stories with songs and melodies, some of them merry as the leaping fire, and some of them plaintive and touching beyond expression. This group of revellers was composed of some of the smartest and most skillful of the out-door slaves—the most of them good hunters and fishers—who had been off for a Spo EE ILE SES oly co a to advantage. — ee sel celeapieatililah apse tials spicentten nd pdeig3it- ing their sensitive shins with the warmth, and talking in uncouth accents, laughing musically, watching the pig roast, and also the pumpkin, and carefully attending to the ’possum, wrapped in leaves and gently baking amid ashes and heated stones. According to their own statements, some of them comic oooks.com |