, was drawn so near as almost to exclude the
light at the same time. Upon this earthen floor, with nothing but its
hard damp surface beneath him, no covering but a tattered shirt and
trowsers, and a few sticks under his head for a pillow, lay an old man of
upwards of seventy, dying. When I first looked at him I thought by the
glazed stare of his eyes, and the flies that had gathered round his half
open mouth, that he was dead: but on stooping nearer, I perceived that the
last faint struggle of life was still going on, but even while I bent over
him it ceased; and so, like a worn-out hound, with no creature to comfort
or relieve his last agony, with neither Christian solace or human succour
near him, with neither wife, nor child, nor even friendly fellow being to
lift his head from the knotty sticks on which he had rested it, or drive
away the insects that buzzed round his lips and nostrils like those of a
fallen beast, died this poor old slave, whose life had been exhausted in
unrequited labour, the fruits of which had gone to pamper the pride and
feed the luxury of those who knew and cared neither for his life or death,
and to whom, if they had heard of the latter, it would have been a matter
of absolute though small gain, the saving of a daily pittance of meal,
which served to prolong a life no longer available to them.

I proceed to the next item in your observer's record. All children below
the age of twelve were unemployed, he says, on the estate he visited: this
is perhaps a questionable benefit, when, no process of mental cultivation
being permitted, the only employment for the leisure thus allowed is that
of rolling, like dogs or cats, in the sand and the sun. On all the
plantations I visited, and on those where I resided, the infants in arms
were committed to the care of these juvenile slaves, who were denominated
nurses, and whose sole employment was what they call to 'mind baby.' The
poor little negro sucklings were cared for (I leave to your own judgement
how efficiently or how tenderly) by these half-savage slips of
slavery--carried by them to the fields where their mothers were working
under the lash, to receive their needful nourishment, and then carried
back again to the 'settlement,' or collection of negro huts, where they
wallowed unheeded in utter filth and neglect until the time again returned
for their being carried to their mother's breast. Such was the employment
of the children of eight or nine yea