I had a curious visit this morning from half a dozen of the women, among whom were Driver Morris’s wife and Venus (a hideous old goddess she was, to be sure), Driver Bran’s mother.  They came especially to see the children, who are always eagerly asked for, and hugely admired by their sooty dependents.  These poor women went into ecstasies over the little white piccaninnies, and were loud and profuse in their expressions of gratitude to massa ——­ for getting married and having children, a matter of thankfulness which, though it always makes me laugh very much, is a most serious one to them; for the continuance of the family keeps the estate and slaves from the hammer, and the poor wretches, besides seeing in every new child born to their owners a security against their own banishment from the only home they know, and separation from all ties of kindred and habit, and dispersion to distant plantations, not unnaturally look for a milder rule from masters who are the children of their fathers’ masters.  The relation of owner and slave may be expected to lose some of its harsher features, and, no doubt, in some instances, does so, when it is on each side the inheritance of successive generations.  And so ——­’s slaves laud, and applaud, and thank, and bless him for having married, and endowed their children with two little future mistresses.  One of these women, a Diana by name, went down on her knees and uttered in a loud voice a sort of extemporaneous prayer of thanksgiving at our advent, in which the sacred and the profane were most ludicrously mingled; her ’tanks to de good Lord God Almighty that missus had come, what give de poor niggar sugar and flannel,’ and dat ’massa ——­, him hab brought de missis and de two little misses down among de people,’ were really too grotesque; and yet certainly more sincere acts of thanksgiving are not often uttered among the solemn and decorous ones that are offered up to heaven for ‘benefits received.’

I find the people here much more inclined to talk than those on the rice-island; they have less to do and more leisure, and bestow it very liberally on me; moreover, the poor old women, of whom there are so many turned out to grass here, and of whom I have spoken to you before, though they are past work, are by no means past gossip, and the stories they have to tell of the former government of the estate under old Massa K——­ are certainly pretty tremendous illustrations of the merits of slavery as a moral institution.  This man, the father of the late owner, Mr. R——­ K——­, was Major ——­’s agent in the management of this property; and a more cruel and unscrupulous one as regards the slaves themselves, whatever he may have been in his dealings with the master, I should think it would be difficult to find, even among the cruel and unscrupulous class to which he belonged.