Oh! my massa told me, there’s no grass in Georgia.

Upon enquiring the meaning of which, I was told it was supposed to be the lamentation of a slave from one of the more northerly states, Virginia or Carolina, where the labour of hoeing the weeds, or grass as they call it, is not nearly so severe as here, in the rice and cotton lands of Georgia.  Another very pretty and pathetic tune began with words that seemed to promise something sentimental—­

    Fare you well, and good-bye, oh, oh! 
    I’m goin’ away to leave you, oh, oh!

but immediately went off into nonsense verses about gentlemen in the parlour drinking wine and cordial, and ladies in the drawing-room drinking tea and coffee, &c.  I have heard that many of the masters and overseers on these plantations prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive character, and having any reference to their particular hardships.  If it is true, I think it a judicious precaution enough—­these poor slaves are just the sort of people over whom a popular musical appeal to their feelings and passions would have an immense power.

In the evening, Mr. ——­’s departure left me to the pleasures of an uninterrupted tete-a-tete with his crosseyed overseer, and I endeavoured, as I generally do, to atone by my conversibleness and civility for the additional trouble which, no doubt, all my outlandish ways and notions are causing the worthy man.  So suggestive (to use the new-fangled jargon about books) a woman as myself is, I suspect, an intolerable nuisance in these parts; and poor Mr. O——­ cannot very well desire Mr. ——­ to send me away, however much he may wish that he would; so that figuratively, as well as literally, I fear the worthy master me voit d’un mauvais oeil, as the French say.  I asked him several questions about some of the slaves who had managed to learn to read, and by what means they had been able to do so.  As teaching them is strictly prohibited by the laws, they who instructed them, and such of them as acquired the knowledge, must have been not a little determined and persevering.  This was my view of the case, of course, and of course it was not the overseer’s.  I asked him if many of Mr. ——­’s slaves could read.  He said ’No; very few, he was happy to say, but those few were just so many too many.’  ‘Why, had he observed any insubordination in those who did?’ And I reminded him of Cooper London, the methodist preacher, whose performance of the burial service had struck me so much some time ago—­to whose exemplary conduct and character there is but one concurrent testimony all over the plantation.  No; he had no special complaint to bring against the lettered members of his subject community, but he spoke by anticipation.  Every