how much more odious they are to me than the alligators that haunt the mud banks of the river round the rice plantation.  It is true that there is something very dreadful in the thick shapeless mass, uniform in colour almost to the black slime on which it lies basking, and which you hardly detect till it begins to move.  But even those ungainly crocodiles never sickened me as those rapid, lithe, and sinuous serpents do.  Did I ever tell you that the people at the rice plantation caught a young alligator and brought it to the house, and it was kept for some time in a tub of water?  It was an ill-tempered little monster; it used to set up its back like a cat when it was angry, and open its long jaws in a most vicious manner.

After looking at my new path in the pine land, I crossed Pike Bluff, and breaking my way all through the burnt district, returned home by Jones’s.  In the afternoon, we paid a long visit to Mr. C——.  It is extremely interesting to me to talk with him about the negroes; he has spent so much of his life among them, has managed them so humanely, and apparently so successfully, that his experience is worthy of all attention.  And yet it seems to me that it is impossible, or rather, perhaps, for those very reasons it is impossible, for him ever to contemplate them in any condition but that of slavery.  He thinks them very like the Irish, and instanced their subserviency, their flattering, their lying, and pilfering, as traits common to the character of both peoples.  But I cannot persuade myself that in both cases, and certainly in that of the negroes, these qualities are not in great measure the result of their condition.  He says that he considers the extremely low diet of the negroes one reason for the absence of crimes of a savage nature among them; most of them do not touch meat the year round.  But in this respect they certainly do not resemble the Irish, who contrive upon about as low a national diet as civilisation is acquainted with, to commit the bloodiest and most frequent outrages with which civilisation has to deal.  His statement that it is impossible to bribe the negroes to work on their own account with any steadiness may be generally true, but admits of quite exceptions enough to throw doubt upon its being natural supineness in the race rather than the inevitable consequence of denying them the entire right to labour for their own profit.  Their laziness seems to me the necessary result of their primary wants being supplied, and all progress denied them.  Of course, if the natural spur to exertion, necessity, is removed, you do away with the will to work of a vast proportion of all who do work in the world.  It is the law of progress that a man’s necessities grow with his exertions to satisfy them, and labour and improvement thus continually act and react upon each other to raise the scale of desire and achievement; and I do not believe that, in the majority of instances among any people on the face of the earth, the will to labour for small indulgences