even while their infants were still dependent upon them for their daily nourishment, is one of which the evil as well as the cruelty is abundantly apparent without comment.  The next note of admiration elicited from your ‘impartial observer’ is bestowed upon the fact that the domestic servants (i.e. house slaves) on the plantation he visited were allowed to live away from the owner’s residence, and to marry.  But I never was on a southern plantation, and I never heard of one, where any of the slaves were allowed to sleep under the same roof with their owner.  With the exception of the women to whose care the children of the planter, if he had any, might be confided, and perhaps a little boy or girl slave, kept as a sort of pet animal and allowed to pass the night on the floor of the sleeping apartment of some member of the family, the residence of any slaves belonging to a plantation night and day in their master’s house, like Northern or European servants, is a thing I believe unknown throughout the Southern States.  Of course I except the cities, and speak only of the estates, where the house servants are neither better housed or accommodated than the field-hands.  Their intolerably dirty habits and offensive persons would indeed render it a severe trial to any family accustomed to habits of decent cleanliness; and, moreover, considerations of safety, and that cautious vigilance which is a hard necessity of the planter’s existence, in spite of the supposed attachment of his slaves, would never permit the near proximity, during the unprotected hours of the night, of those whose intimacy with the daily habits and knowledge of the nightly securities resorted to might prove terrible auxiliaries to any attack from without.  The city guards, patrols, and night-watches, together with their stringent rules about negroes being abroad after night, and their well fortified lock-up houses for all detected without a pass, afford some security against these attached dependents; but on remote plantations, where the owner and his family and perhaps a white overseer are alone, surrounded by slaves and separated from all succour against them, they do not sleep under the white man’s roof, and, for politic reasons, pass the night away from their master’s abode.  The house servants have no other or better allowance of food than the field labourers, but have the advantage of eking it out by what is left from the master’s table,—­if possible, with even less comfort in one respect, inasmuch as no time whatever is set apart for their meals, which they snatch at any hour and in any way that they can—­generally, however, standing or squatting on their hams round the kitchen fire; the kitchen being a mere outhouse or barn with a fire in it.  On the estate where I lived, as I have mentioned, they had no sleeping-rooms in the house; but when their work was over, they retired like the rest to their hovels, the discomfort of which had to them all the additional disadvantage of comparison