So accustomed do American travellers in the south appear, to this system of internal surveillance, that I several times noticed strangers at the hotel or cafe counters openly explaining the object of their visits, and if there is nothing to conceal, however annoying the alternative appears, I am convinced the policy is not had, a host of suspicions being silenced by such a course.

In my travels on the whole route from New York to Charleston, I discovered a most unjustifiable and impertinent disposition to pry into the business of others.  If I was questioned once, I am sure I was at least fifty times, by my fellow—­travellers from time to time as to my motive for visiting America, and my intended proceedings.  I found, however’, that a certain reserve was an efficient remedy.  Captain Waterton, of South American celebrity, as an ornithologist, and who visited North America in his travels, mentions that if you confide your affairs and intentions when questioned, the Americans reciprocate that confidence by relating their own.  My own experience, however, did not corroborate this view of the case, for, though loquacious in the extreme, and gifted, so that to use a Yankee phrase, they would “talk a dog’s hind-leg off,” they are in general cautious not to divulge their secrets.  To say the least of it, the habit of prying into the business of others, is one totally unbecoming a well-ordered state of society, which the American, speaking generally, is decidedly not.  It is extremely annoying, from the unpleasant feeling it excites, that you are suspected if not watched (this applies forcibly to the slave districts); and it is a habit that has arisen purely from the incongruity of society at large on the American continent, and a want of that subdivision of class that exists in Europe.

During my visits to the various hotels while I remained in Charleston, for the purpose of collecting information, I was several times interrogated in a barefaced manner by the visitors who frequent those places, as to my politics, and especially as to my principles in regard to the institution of slavery; now, as I was not unaware that my intimacy with the gentleman of colour, which I have already referred to, had got abroad, I was obliged to be extremely guarded in my replies on such occasions.  It was on one of these that I felt myself in great hazard, for two individuals in the company were discussing with much energy, the question of amalgamation (that is, marriage, contracted between black and white men and women), and I was listening intently to their altercation, when suddenly one of them, eyeing me with malicious gaze, no doubt having noticed my attention to the colloquy, said,

“Your opinion, stranger, on this subject; I guess you understand it torrably well, as you seem to be pretty hard on B——­’s eldest daughter.”  This unexpected sally rather alarmed me, for the name he mentioned was that of my coloured friend I have before alluded to, and whose daughter I had only met once, and that at her father’s house.