irrepressible mirth to a most painful degree.  Mr. ——­ was in a state of towering anger and indignation, and besides a flogging sentenced the unhappy cook to degradation from his high and dignified position (and, alas! all its sweets of comparatively easy labour and good living from the remains of our table) to the hard toil, coarse scanty fare, and despised position of a common field hand.  I suppose some punishment was inevitably necessary in such a plain case of deliberate theft as this, but, nevertheless, my whole soul revolts at the injustice of visiting upon these poor wretches a moral darkness which all possible means are taken to increase and perpetuate.

In speaking of this and the whole circumstance of John’s trespass to Mr. ——­ in the evening, I observed that the ignorance of these poor people ought to screen them from punishment.  He replied, that they knew well enough what was right and wrong.  I asked how they could be expected to know it?  He replied, by the means of Cooper London, and the religious instruction he gave them.  So that, after all, the appeal is to be made against themselves to that moral and religious instruction which is withheld from them, and which, if they obtain it at all, is the result of their own unaided and unencouraged exertion.  The more I hear, and see, and learn, and ponder the whole of this system of slavery, the more impossible I find it to conceive how its practisers and upholders are to justify their deeds before the tribunal of their own conscience or God’s law.  It is too dreadful to have those whom we love accomplices to this wickedness; it is too intolerable to find myself an involuntary accomplice to it.

I had a conversation the next morning with Abraham, cook John’s brother, upon the subject of his brother’s theft; and only think of the slave saying that ‘this action had brought disgrace upon the family.’  Does not that sound very like the very best sort of free pride, the pride of character, the honourable pride of honesty, integrity, and fidelity?  But this was not all, for this same Abraham, a clever carpenter and much valued hand on the estate, went on, in answer to my questions, to tell me such a story that I declare to you I felt as if I could have howled with helpless indignation and grief when he departed and went to resume his work.  His grandfather had been an old slave in Darien, extremely clever as a carpenter, and so highly valued for his skill and good character that his master allowed him to purchase his liberty by money which he earned by working for himself at odd times, when his task work was over.  I asked Abraham what sum his grandfather paid for his freedom:  he said he did not know, but he supposed a large one, because of his being a ‘skilled carpenter,’ and so a peculiarly valuable chattel.  I presume, from what I remember Major M——­ and Dr. H——­ saying on the subject of the market value of negroes in Charleston and Savannah, that such a man in the prime of life would have been