I rode home very fast, in spite of the exquisite fragrance of the wild cherry blossoms, the carpets and curtains of wild flowers, among which a sort of glorified dandelion glowed conspicuously; dandelions such as I should think grew in the garden of Eden, if there were any at all there.  I passed the finest magnolia that I have yet seen; it was magnificent, and I suppose had been spared for its beauty, for it grew in the very middle of a cotton field; it was as large as a fine forest tree, and its huge glittering leaves shone like plates of metal in the sun; what a spectacle that tree must be in blossom, and I should think its perfume must be smelt from one end of the plantation to the other.  What a glorious creature!  Which do you think ought to weigh most in the scale, the delight of such a vegetable, or the disgust of the black animal I had just met a few minutes before?  Would you take the one with the other?  Neither would I.

I have spent the whole afternoon at home; my ‘gang’ is busily at work again.  Sawney, one of them, came to join it nearly at sun-down, not having got through his day’s task before.  In watching and listening to these lads, I was constantly struck with the insolent tyranny of their demeanour towards each other.  This is almost a universal characteristic of the manner of the negroes among themselves.  They are diabolically cruel to animals too, and they seem to me as a rule hardly to know the difference between truth and falsehood.  These detestable qualities, which I constantly hear attributed to them as innate and inherent in their race, appear to me the direct result of their condition.  The individual exceptions among them are, I think, quite as many as would be found under similar circumstances, among the same number of white people.

In considering the whole condition of the people on this plantation, it appears to me that the principal hardships fall to the lot of the women; that is, the principal physical hardships.  The very young members of the community are of course idle and neglected; the very very old, idle and neglected too; the middle-aged men do not appear to me over-worked, and lead a mere animal existence, in itself not peculiarly cruel or distressing, but involving a constant element of fear and uncertainty, and the trifling evils of unrequited labour, ignorance the most profound, (to which they are condemned by law); and the unutterable injustice which precludes them from all the merits and all the benefits of voluntary exertion, and the progress that results from it.  If they are absolutely unconscious of these evils, then they are not very ill-off brutes, always barring the chance of being given or sold away from their mates or their young—­processes which even brutes do not always relish.  I am very much struck with the vein of melancholy, which assumes almost a poetical tone in some of the things they say.  Did I tell you of that poor old decrepid creature Dorcas, who came to beg some sugar of me the other day? saying as she took up my watch from the table and looked at it, ’Ah?  I need not look at this, I have almost done with time!’ Was not that striking from such a poor old ignorant crone?