done to him.  When I visited the island, Betty was again living with her husband—­a grave, sad, thoughtful-looking man, whose admirable moral and mental qualities were extolled to me by no worse a judge of such matters than Mr. K——­ himself, during the few days he spent with Mr. ——­, while we were on the plantation.  This outrage upon this man’s rights was perfectly notorious among all the slaves; and his hopeful offspring, Renty, alluding very unmistakably to his superior birth on one occasion when he applied for permission to have a gun, observed that, though the people in general on the plantation were not allowed firearms, he thought he might, on account of his colour, and added that he thought Mr. K——­ might have left him his.  This precious sample of the mode in which the vices of the whites procure the intellectual progress of the blacks to their own endangerment, was, as you will easily believe, a significant chapter to me in the black history of oppression which is laid before my eyes in this place.]

Yesterday afternoon I received a visit from the wife of our neighbour Dr. T——.  As usual, she exclaimed at my good fortune in having a white woman with my children when she saw M——­, and, as usual, went on to expatiate on the utter impossibility of finding a trustworthy nurse anywhere in the South, to whom your children could be safely confided for a day or even an hour; as usual too, the causes of this unworthiness or incapacity for a confidential servant’s occupation were ignored, and the fact laid to the natural defects of the negro race.  I am sick and weary of this cruel and ignorant folly.  This afternoon I went out to refresh myself with a row on the broad Altamaha and the conversation of my slave Jack, which is, I assure you, by no means devoid of interest of various kinds, pathetic and humorous.  I do not know that Jack’s scientific information is the most valuable in the world, and I sometimes marvel with perhaps unjust incredulity at the facts in natural history which he imparts to me; for instance, to-day he told me as we rowed past certain mud islands, very like children’s mud puddings on a rather larger scale than usual, that they were inaccessible, and that it would be quite impossible to land on one of them even for the shortest time.  Not understanding why people who did not mind being up to their knees in mud should not land there if they pleased, I demurred to his assertion, when he followed it up by assuring me that there were what he called sand-sinks under the mud, and that whatever was placed on the surface would not only sink through the mud, but also into a mysterious quicksand of unknown depth and extent below it.  This may be true, but sounds very strange, although I remember that the frequent occurrence of large patches of quicksand was found to be one of the principal impediments in the way of the canal speculators at Brunswick.  I did not, however, hear that these sinks, as Jack called them, were found below a thick stratum of heavy mud.