to get our
poor flesh some rest from de whip; when he made me follow him into de
bush, what use me tell him no? he have strength to make me.' I have
written down the woman's words; I wish I could write down the voice and
look of abject misery with which they were spoken. Now, you will observe
that the story was not told to me as a complaint; it was a thing long past
and over, of which she only spoke in the natural course of accounting for
her children to me. I make no comment; what need, or can I add, to such
stories? But how is such a state of things to endure?--and again, how is
it to end? While I was pondering, as it seemed to me, at the very bottom
of the Slough of Despond, on this miserable creature's story, another
woman came in (Tema), carrying in her arms a child the image of the
mulatto Bran; she came to beg for flannel. I asked her who was her
husband. She said she was not married. Her child is the child of
bricklayer Temple, who has a wife at the rice island. By this time, what
do you think of the moralities, as well as the amenities, of slave life?
These are the conditions which can only be known to one who lives among
them; flagrant acts of cruelty may be rare, but this ineffable state of
utter degradation, this really _beastly_ existence, is the normal
condition of these men and women, and of that no one seems to take heed,
nor have I ever heard it described so as to form any adequate conception
of it, till I found myself plunged into it;--where and how is one to begin
the cleansing of this horrid pestilential immondezzio of an existence?

It is Wednesday, the 20th of March; we cannot stay here much longer; I
wonder if I shall come back again! and whether, when I do, I shall find
the trace of one idea of a better life left in these poor people's minds
by my sojourn among them.

One of my industries this morning has been cutting out another dress for
one of our women, who had heard of my tailoring prowess at the rice
island. The material, as usual, was a miserable cotton, many-coloured like
the scarf of Iris. While shaping it for my client, I ventured to suggest
the idea of the possibility of a change of the nethermost as well as the
uppermost garment. This, I imagine, is a conception that has never dawned
upon the female slave mind on this plantation. They receive twice a year a
certain supply of clothing, and wear them (as I have heard some nasty fine
ladies do their stays, for fear they should get out of