it is most true that in Ireland nothing can be more savage, brutish, filthy, idle, and incorrigibly and hopelessly helpless and incapable, than the Irish appear; and yet, transplanted to your northern states, freed from the evil influences which surround them at home, they and their children become industrious, thrifty, willing to learn, able to improve, and forming, in the course of two generations, a most valuable accession to your labouring population.  How is it that it never occurs to these emphatical denouncers of the whole negro race that the Irish at home are esteemed much as they esteem their slaves, and that the sentence pronounced against their whole country by one of the greatest men of our age, an Irishman, was precisely, that nothing could save, redeem, or regenerate Ireland unless, as a preparatory measure, the island were submerged and all its inhabitants drowned off?

I have had several women at the house to-day asking for advice and help for their sick children:  they all came from No. 2, as they call it, that is, the settlement or cluster of negro huts nearest to the main one, where we may be said to reside.  In the afternoon I went thither, and found a great many of the little children ailing; there had been an unusual mortality among them at this particular settlement this winter.  In one miserable hut I heard that the baby was just dead; it was one of thirteen, many of whom had been, like itself, mercifully removed from the life of degradation and misery to which their birth appointed them:  and whether it was the frequent repetition of similar losses, or an instinctive consciousness that death was indeed better than life for such children as theirs, I know not, but the father and mother, and old Rose, the nurse, who was their little baby’s grandmother, all seemed apathetic, and apparently indifferent to the event.  The mother merely repeated over and over again, ‘I’ve lost a many, they all goes so;’ and the father, without word or comment, went out to his enforced labour.

As I left the cabin, rejoicing for them at the deliverance out of slavery of their poor child, I found myself suddenly surrounded by a swarm of young ragamuffins in every stage of partial nudity, clamouring from out of their filthy remnants of rags for donations of scarlet ribbon for the ball, which was to take place that evening.  The melancholy scene I had just witnessed, and the still sadder reflection it had given rise to, had quite driven all thoughts of the approaching festivity from my mind; but the sudden demand for these graceful luxuries by Mr. ——­’s half-naked dependants reminded me of the grotesque mask which life wears on one of its mysterious faces; and with as much sympathy for rejoicing as my late sympathy for sorrow had left me capable of, I procured the desired ornaments.  I have considerable fellow-feeling for the passion for all shades of red, which prevails among these dusky fellow-creatures of mine—­a savage propensity for that same colour in all its modifications being a tendency of my own.