I Went Upon One Of These Islands, By Means Of A Foot-Bridge, And Was Pointed To Another, The Resort Of A Quoit-Club Comprising Some Of The Most Distinguished Men Of Richmond, Among Whom In His Lifetime Was Judge Marshall, Who Sometimes Joined In This Athletic Sport.

We descended one of the hills on which the town is built, and went up another to the east, where stands an ancient house of religious worship, the oldest Episcopal church in the state.

It is in the midst of a burying-ground, where sleep some of the founders of the colony, whose old graves are greenly overgrown with the trailing and matted periwinkle. In this church, Patrick Henry, at the commencement of the American Revolution, made that celebrated speech, which so vehemently moved all who heard him, ending with the sentence: "Give me liberty or give me death." We looked in at one of the windows; it is a low, plain room, with small, square pews, and a sounding board over the little pulpit. From the hill on which this church stands, you have a beautiful view of the surrounding country, a gently undulating surface, closed in by hills on the west; and the James River is seen wandering through it, by distant plantations, and between borders of trees. A place was pointed out to us, a little way down the river, which bears the name of Powhatan; and here, I was told, a flat rock is still shown as the one on which Captain Smith was placed by his captors, in order to be put to death, when the intercession of Pocahontas saved his life.

I went with an acquaintance to see the inspection and sale of tobacco. Huge, upright columns of dried leaves, firmly packed and of a greenish hue, stood in rows, under the roof of a broad, low building, open on all sides - these were the hogsheads of tobacco, stripped of the staves. The inspector, a portly man, with a Bourbon face, his white hair gathered in a tie behind, went very quietly and expeditiously through his task of determining the quality, after which the vast bulks were disposed of, in a very short time, with surprisingly little noise, to the tobacco merchants. Tobacco, to the value of three millions of dollars annually, is sent by the planters to Richmond, and thence distributed to different nations, whose merchants frequent this mart. In the sales it is always sure to bring cash, which, to those who detest the weed, is a little difficult to understand.

I went afterwards to a tobacco factory, the sight of which amused me, though the narcotic fumes made me cough. In one room a black man was taking apart the small bundles of leaves of which a hogshead of tobacco is composed, and carefully separating leaf from leaf; others were assorting the leaves according to the quality, and others again were arranging the leaves in layers and sprinkling each layer with the extract of liquorice. In another room were about eighty negroes, boys they are called, from the age of twelve years up to manhood, who received the leaves thus prepared, rolled them into long even rolls, and then cut them into plugs of about four inches in length, which were afterwards passed through a press, and thus became ready for market.

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