worth from 1,500 to 2,000 dollars.  However, whatever the man paid for his ransom, by his grandson’s account, fourteen years after he became free, when he died, he had again amassed money to the amount of 700 dollars, which he left among his wife and children, the former being a slave on Major ——­’s estate, where the latter remained by virtue of that fact slaves also.  So this man not only bought his own freedom at a cost of at least 1,000 dollars, but left a little fortune of 700 more at his death:  and then we are told of the universal idleness, thriftlessness, incorrigible sloth, and brutish incapacity of this inferior race of creatures, whose only fitting and Heaven-appointed condition is that of beasts of burthen to the whites.  I do not believe the whole low white population of the state of Georgia could furnish such an instance of energy, industry, and thrift, as the amassing of this laborious little fortune by this poor slave, who left, nevertheless, his children and grandchildren to the lot from which he had so heroically ransomed himself:  and yet the white men with whom I live and talk tell me, day after day, that there is neither cruelty nor injustice in this accursed system.

About half-past five I went to walk on the dykes, and met a gang of the field-hands going to the tide-mill, as the water served them for working then.  I believe I have told you that besides the great steam mill there is this, which is dependent on the rise and fall of the tide in the river, and where the people are therefore obliged to work by day or night at whatever time the water serves to impel the wheel.  They greeted me with their usual profusion of exclamations, petitions, and benedictions, and I parted from them to come and oversee my slave Jack, for whom I had bought a spade, and to whom I had entrusted the task of turning up some ground for me, in which I wanted to establish some of the Narcissus and other flowers I had remarked about the ground and the house.  Jack, however, was a worse digger than Adam could have been when first he turned his hand to it, after his expulsion from Paradise.  I think I could have managed a spade with infinitely more efficiency, or rather less incapacity, than he displayed.  Upon my expressing my amazement at his performance, he said the people here never used spades, but performed all their agricultural operations with the hoe.  Their soil must be very light and their agriculture very superficial, I should think.  However, I was obliged to terminate Jack’s spooning process and abandon, for the present, my hopes of a flower-bed created by his industry, being called into the house to receive the return visit of old Mrs. S——.  As usual, the appearance, health, vigour, and good management of the children were the theme of wondering admiration; as usual, my possession of a white nurse the theme of envious congratulation; as usual, I had to hear the habitual senseless complaints of the inefficiency of coloured