prime field-hand, with some knowledge of carpentry and a good performer on the violin,—­but evasions must be checked, and I cannot see why Mr. Mellasys’s method was too severe.  Mr. Mellasys was also considered a very unscrupulous person in financial transactions,—­indeed, what would be named in some communities a swindler; and I have heard it whispered that the estimable, but somewhat obese and drowsy person who passed as his wife was not a wife, ceremonially speaking.  The dusky hues of her complexion were also attributed to an infusion of African blood.  There was certainly more curl in her hair than I could have wished; and Saccharissa’s wiggy looks waged an irrepressible conflict with the unguents which strove to reduce their crispness.

Indeed, why should I not be candid?  Mellasys per se was a pill, Mrs. Mellasys was a dose, and Saccharissa a bolus, to one of my refined and sensitive taste.

But the sugar coated them.

To marry the daughter of the great sugar-planter of Louisiana I would have taken medicines far more unpalatable and assafoetidesque than any thus far offered.

Meanwhile Mr. Mellasys Plickaman, cousin of my betrothed, had changed his tactics and treated me with civility and confidence.  We drank together freely, sometimes to the point of inebriation.  Indeed, unless he put me to bed, on the evening before the day of the events I am about to describe, I do not know how I got there.

Morning dawned on the sixth of November.

I was awakened, as usual, by the outcries of the refractory negroes receiving their matinal stripes in the whipping-house.  Feeling a little languid and tame, I strolled down to witness the spectacle.

It stimulated me quite agreeably.  The African cannot avoid being comic.  He is the grotesque element in our civilization.  He will be droll even under the severest punishment.  His contortions of body, his grimaces, his ejaculations of “O Lor’!  O Massa!” as the paddle or the lash strikes his flesh, are laughable in the extreme.

I witnessed the flagellation of several pieces of property of either sex.  The sight of their beating had the effect of a gentle tickling upon me.  The tone of my system was restored.  I grew gay and lightsome.  I exchanged jokes with the overseer.  He appreciated my mood, and gave a farcical turn to the incidents of the occasion.

I enjoyed my breakfast enormously.  Saccharissa never looked so sweet; Mr. Mellasys never so little like—­pardon the expression—­a cross between a hog and a hyena; and I began to fancy that my mother-in-law’s general flabbiness of flesh and drapery was not so very offensive.

After breakfast, Mr. Mellasys left us.  It was, he said, the day of the election for President.  How wretched that America should not be governed by hereditary sovereigns and an order of nobles trained to control!

The day passed.  It was afternoon, and I sat reading one of the novels of my favorite De Balzac to my Saccharissa.  At the same time my imagination, following the author, strayed to Paris, and recalled to me my bachelor joys in that gay capital.  I resolved to repeat them again, on our arrival there, at my bride’s expense.  How charming to possess a hundred thousand dollars, ($100,000,) even burdened with a wife!