floor, the soil itself, damp with perpetual drippings from the holes in the roof, and the open space which served for a window was protected only by a broken shutter, which, in order to exclude the cold, was drawn so near as almost to exclude the light at the same time.  Upon this earthen floor, with nothing but its hard damp surface beneath him, no covering but a tattered shirt and trowsers, and a few sticks under his head for a pillow, lay an old man of upwards of seventy, dying.  When I first looked at him I thought by the glazed stare of his eyes, and the flies that had gathered round his half open mouth, that he was dead:  but on stooping nearer, I perceived that the last faint struggle of life was still going on, but even while I bent over him it ceased; and so, like a worn-out hound, with no creature to comfort or relieve his last agony, with neither Christian solace or human succour near him, with neither wife, nor child, nor even friendly fellow being to lift his head from the knotty sticks on which he had rested it, or drive away the insects that buzzed round his lips and nostrils like those of a fallen beast, died this poor old slave, whose life had been exhausted in unrequited labour, the fruits of which had gone to pamper the pride and feed the luxury of those who knew and cared neither for his life or death, and to whom, if they had heard of the latter, it would have been a matter of absolute though small gain, the saving of a daily pittance of meal, which served to prolong a life no longer available to them.

I proceed to the next item in your observer’s record.  All children below the age of twelve were unemployed, he says, on the estate he visited:  this is perhaps a questionable benefit, when, no process of mental cultivation being permitted, the only employment for the leisure thus allowed is that of rolling, like dogs or cats, in the sand and the sun.  On all the plantations I visited, and on those where I resided, the infants in arms were committed to the care of these juvenile slaves, who were denominated nurses, and whose sole employment was what they call to ‘mind baby.’  The poor little negro sucklings were cared for (I leave to your own judgement how efficiently or how tenderly) by these half-savage slips of slavery—­carried by them to the fields where their mothers were working under the lash, to receive their needful nourishment, and then carried back again to the ‘settlement,’ or collection of negro huts, where they wallowed unheeded in utter filth and neglect until the time again returned for their being carried to their mother’s breast.  Such was the employment of the children of eight or nine years old, and the only supervision exercised over either babies or ‘baby minders’ was that of the old woman left in charge of the infirmary, where she made her abode all day long and bestowed such samples of her care and skill upon its inmates as I shall have occasion to mention presently.  The practice of thus driving the mothers a-field,