In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.  I received a visit this morning from some of the Darien people.  Among them was a most interesting young person, from whose acquaintance, if I have any opportunity of cultivating it, I promise myself much pleasure.  The ladies that I have seen since I crossed the southern line, have all seemed to me extremely sickly in their appearance—­delicate in the refined term, but unfortunately sickly in the truer one.  They are languid in their deportment and speech, and seem to give themselves up, without an effort to counteract it, to the enervating effect of their warm climate.  It is undoubtedly a most relaxing and unhealthy one, and therefore requires the more imperatively to be met by energetic and invigorating habits both of body and mind.  Of these, however, the southern ladies appear to have, at present, no very positive idea.  Doctor ——­ told us to-day of a comical application which his negro man had made to him for the coat he was then wearing.  I forget whether the fellow wanted the loan, or the absolute gift of it, but his argument was (it might have been an Irishman’s) that he knew his master intended to give it to him by and by, and that he thought he might as well let him have it at once, as keep him waiting any longer for it.  This story the Doctor related with great glee, and it furnishes a very good sample of what the Southerners are fond of exhibiting, the degree of licence to which they capriciously permit their favourite slaves occasionally to carry their familiarity.  They seem to consider it as an undeniable proof of the general kindness with which their dependents are treated.  It is as good a proof of it as the maudlin tenderness of a fine lady to her lap-dog is of her humane treatment of animals in general.  Servants whose claims to respect are properly understood by themselves and their employers, are not made pets, playthings, jesters, or companions of, and it is only the degradation of the many that admits of this favouritism to the few—­a system of favouritism which, as it is perfectly consistent with the profoundest contempt and injustice, degrades the object of it quite as much, though it oppresses him less, than the cruelty practised upon his fellows.  I had several of these favourite slaves presented to me, and one or two little negro children, who their owners assured me were quite pets.  The only real service which this arbitrary goodwill did to the objects of it was quite involuntary and unconscious on the part of their kind masters—­I mean the inevitable improvement in intelligence, which resulted to them from being more constantly admitted to the intercourse of the favoured white race.