on a bed of roses.  He bore King George’s commission, and was a major in the British army, but having married a great Carolina heiress, and become proprietor of these plantations, sided with the country of his adoption, and not that of his birth, in the war between them, and was a special object of animosity on that account to the English officers who attacked the sea-board of Georgia, and sent troops on shore and up the Altamaha, to fetch off the negroes, or incite them to rise against their owners.  ‘De British,’ said Molly ’make old massa run about bery much in de great revelation war.’  He ran effectually, however, and contrived to save both his life and property from the invader.

Molly’s account was full of interest, in spite of the grotesque lingo in which it was delivered, and which once or twice nearly sent me into convulsions of laughing, whereupon she apologized with great gravity for her mispronunciation, modestly suggesting that white words were impossible to the organs of speech of black folks.  It is curious how universally any theory, no matter how absurd, is accepted by these people, for anything in which the contemptuous supremacy of the dominant race is admitted, and their acquiescence in the theory of their own incorrigible baseness is so complete, that this, more than any other circumstance in their condition, makes me doubtful of their rising from it.

In order to set poor dear old Molly’s notions straight with regard to the negro incapacity for speaking plain the noble white words, I called S——­ to me and set her talking; and having pointed out to Molly how very imperfect her mode of pronouncing many words was, convinced the worthy old negress that want of training, and not any absolute original impotence, was the reason why she disfigured the white words, for which she had such a profound respect.  In this matter, as in every other, the slaves pay back to their masters the evil of their own dealings with usury, though unintentionally.  No culture, however slight, simple, or elementary, is permitted to these poor creatures, and the utterance of many of them is more like what Prospero describes Caliban’s to have been, than the speech of men and women in a Christian and civilised land:  the children of their owners, brought up among them, acquire their negro mode of talking;—­slavish speech surely it is—­and it is distinctly perceptible in the utterances of all southerners, particularly of the women, whose avocations, taking them less from home, are less favourable to their throwing off this ignoble trick of pronunciation, than the more varied occupation, and the more extended and promiscuous business relations of men.  The Yankee twang of the regular down Easter is not more easily detected by any ear, nice in enunciation and accent, than the thick negro speech of the southerners:  neither is lovely or melodious; but though the Puritan snuffle is the harsher of the two, the slave slobber of the language is the more ignoble, in spite of the softer voices of the pretty southern women who utter it.