with their owner’s mode of living.  In all establishments whatever, of course some disparity exists between the accommodation of the drawing-rooms and best bed-rooms and the servants’ kitchen and attics; but on a plantation it is no longer a matter of degree.  The young women who performed the offices of waiting and housemaids, and the lads who attended upon the service of their master’s table where I lived, had neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down upon themselves; the ‘boys’ lay all night on the hearth by the kitchen fire, and the women upon the usual slave’s bed—­a frame of rough boards, strewed with a little moss off the trees, with the addition perhaps of a tattered and filthy blanket.  As for the so-called privilege of marrying—­surely it is gross mockery to apply such a word to a bond which may be holy in God’s sight, but which did not prevent the owner of a plantation where my observations were made from selling and buying men and their so-called wives and children into divided bondage, nor the white overseer from compelling the wife of one of the most excellent and exemplary of his master’s slaves to live with him—­nor the white wife of another overseer, in her husband’s temporary absence from the estate, from barbarously flogging three married slaves within a month of their confinement, their condition being the result of the profligacy of the said overseer, and probably compelled by the very same lash by which it was punished.  This is a very disgusting picture of married life on slave estates:  but I have undertaken to reply to the statements of your informant, and I regret to be obliged to record the facts by which alone I can do so.  ‘Work,’ continues your authority, ’began at six in the morning, at nine an hour’s rest was allowed for breakfast, and by two or three o’clock the day’s work was done.’  Certainly this was a pattern plantation, and I can only lament that my experience lay amid such far less favourable circumstances.  The negroes among whom I lived went to the fields at daybreak, carrying with them their allowance of food, which toward noon, and not till then, they ate, cooking it over a fire which they kindled as best they could where they were working; their second meal in the day was at night after their labour was over, having worked at the very least six hours without rest or refreshment, since their noon-day meal—­properly so called, indeed, for it was meal and nothing else, or a preparation something thicker than porridge, which they call hominy.  Perhaps the candid observer, whose report of the estate he visited appeared to you so consolatory, would think that this diet contrasted favourably with that of potato and butter-milk fed Irish labourers.  But a more just comparison surely would be with the mode of living of the labouring population of the United States, the peasantry of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, or indeed with the condition of those very potato and butter-milk fed Irishmen when they have exchanged