lette_, compounded
now of rice and now of Indian meal, delicious butter and fruits, all
good of their kind. And is there anything bitter rising up from the
bottom of the social bowl? My black friends who attend on me are grave
as Mussulman Khitmutgars. They are attired in liveries, and wear white
cravats and Berlin gloves. At night when we retire, off they go to their
outer darkness in the small settlement of negrohood, which is separated
from our house by a wooden palisade. Their fidelity is undoubted. The
house breathes an air of security. The doors and windows are unlocked.
There is but one gun, a fowling-piece, on the premises. No planter
hereabouts has any dread of his slaves. But I have seen, within the
short time I have been in this part of the world, several dreadful
accounts of murder and violence, in which masters suffered at the hands
of their slaves. There is something suspicious in the constant,
never-ending statement that "we are not afraid of our slaves."
The curfew and the night patrol in the streets, the prisons and
watch-houses, and the police regulations, prove that strict supervision,
at all events, is needed and necessary. My host is a kind man and a good
master. If slaves are happy anywhere, they should be so with him.

These people are fed by their master. They have upward of half a pound
per diem of fat pork, and corn in abundance. They rear poultry and sell
their chickens and eggs to the house. They are clothed by their master.
He keeps them in sickness as in health. Now and then there are gifts of
tobacco and molasses for the deserving. There was little labor going on
in the fields, for the rice has been just exerting itself to get its
head above water. These fields yield plentifully; for the waters of the
river are fat, and they are let in whenever the planter requires it, by
means of floodgates and small canals, through which the flats can carry
their loads of grain to the river for loading the steamers.

[Following our traveller in his peregrinations through the
South, we next take him up on a sugar plantation on the
Mississippi. The part of his journey in which we now find him
is to be taken by boat.]

Charon pushed his skiff into the water--there was a good deal of rain in
it--in shape of snuffer-dish, some ten feet long and a foot deep. I got
in, and the conscious waters immediately began vigorously spurting
through the cotton wadding wherewith the craft was calked.