FLORIDA FOLKS AND


FAMILIES.


of tricks, giving their names differently to their foremen,
the commissary clerk, and the paymaster, creating all sorts of
unexpected confusion and disputes, requiring close care and
watching, greatly increasing the duties of the overseers.
If there was any mischief or deviltry in the camp, we nearly
always discovered that a mulatto was at the bottom of it.
 The 10th of each month was pay-day, the great day
with the darkeys, and a busy day at the pay-table. It was
a regulation holiday with the gangs; not a bit of work
would they perform, but at an early hour they would gather
at the pay-office-scuffling, dancing, shouting, singing-a


happy crowd
standard price
track-spikes)
ty-five to a
darkeys of a
uine blacks,
they usually
always were


indeed. One
ee; the colored


dollar per day was the regular
"spikers" (men who drive the


and sub-foremen received a dollar and twen-
dollar and forty cents per day. The older
bout forty or fifty years, especially the genu-
were, as I have said, by far the best laborers;
kept records to "tallies" of their labor, and
correct. But the young darkeys, especially


the yeller fellers," the class that loves to dance and sing,
never averaged over fifteen days' labor in the month, and
were always disputing their time-accounts.
 After pay-day they would strangely be missing-that is,
the younger class-but a hunt through the woods would
reveal their whereabouts; under the trees and in out-of-
the-way thickets they were to be found in small, quiet,
earnest-faced little groups-gambling! The darkey is a
most inveterate gambler, the equal of the Chinaman or
Indian in this vice. The Chinaman will gamble himself
away-that, is he will bind himself to work for his winning
opponent for certain lengths of time; the Indian will gam-
ble away his horses, tepees (or wigwams), squaws, and
papooses; but the darkey will gamble all he has earned
by months of hard labor, and all he can steal from his hard-
working fellow-laborers.