The mulatto woman, Sally, accosted me again to-day, and begged that she might be put to some other than field labour.  Supposing she felt herself unequal to it, I asked her some questions, but the principal reason she urged for her promotion to some less laborious kind of work was, that hoeing in the field was so hard to her on ‘account of her colour,’ and she therefore petitions to be allowed to learn a trade.  I was much puzzled at this reason for her petition, but was presently made to understand that being a mulatto, she considered field labour a degradation; her white bastardy appearing to her a title to consideration in my eyes.  The degradation of these people is very complete, for they have accepted the contempt of their masters to that degree that they profess, and really seem to feel it for themselves, and the faintest admixture of white blood in their black veins appears at once, by common consent of their own race, to raise them in the scale of humanity.  I had not much sympathy for this petition.  The woman’s father had been a white man who was employed for some purpose on the estate.  In speaking upon this subject to Mrs. G——­, she said that, as far as her observation went, the lower class of white men in the south lived with coloured women precisely as they would at the north with women of their own race; the outcry that one hears against amalgamation appears therefore to be something educated and acquired, rather than intuitive.  I cannot perceive in observing my children, that they exhibit the slightest repugnance or dislike to these swarthy dependents of theirs, which they surely would do if, as is so often pretended, there is an inherent, irreconcilable repulsion on the part of the white towards the negro race.  All the southern children that I have seen seem to have a special fondness for these good-natured childish human beings, whose mental condition is kin in its simplicity and proneness to impulsive emotion to their own, and I can detect in them no trace of the abhorrence and contempt for their dusky skins which all questions of treating them with common justice is so apt to elicit from American men and women.

To-day, for the first time since I left the Rice Island, I went out fishing, but had no manner of luck.  Jack rowed me up Jones’s Creek, a small stream which separates St. Simon’s from the main, on the opposite side from the great waters of the Altamaha.  The day was very warm.  It is becoming almost too hot to remain here much longer, at least for me, who dread and suffer from heat so much.  The whole summer, however, is passed by many members of the Georgia families on their estates by the sea.  When the heat is intense, the breeze from the ocean and the salt air, I suppose, prevent it from being intolerable or hurtful.  Our neighbour Mr. C——­ and his family reside entirely, the year round, on their plantations here without apparently suffering in their health from the effects of the climate.