country, paralyzes civilization, and vitiates human nature itself.  The brilliant girl of the earlier journal is the sobered and solemnized matron of this.  The very magnitude of the misery that surrounds her, the traces of which everywhere sadden her eye and wring her heart, compel her to the simplest narration.  There is no writing for effect.  There is not a single “sensational” passage.  The story is monotonous; for the wrong it describes is perpetual and unrelieved.  “There is not a single natural right,” she says, after some weeks’ residence, “that is not taken away from these unfortunate people; and the worst of all is, that their condition does not appear to me, upon further observation of it, to be susceptible of even partial alleviation, as long as the fundamental evil, the Slavery itself, remains.”

As the mistress of the plantation, she was brought into constant intercourse with the slave-women; and no other account of this class is so thorough and plainly stated.  So pitiful a tale was seldom told.  It was a “model plantation”; but every day was darkened to the mistress by the appeals of these women and her observation of their condition.  The heart of the reader sickens as hers despaired.  To produce “little niggers” for Massa and Missis was the enforced ambition of these poor women.  After the third week of confinement they were sent into the fields to work.  If they lingered or complained, they were whipped.  For beseeching the mistress to pray for some relief in their sad straits, they were also whipped.  If their tasks were unperformed, or the driver lost his temper, they were whipped again.  If they would not yield to the embrace of the overseer, they were whipped once more.  How are they whipped?  They are tied by the wrists to a beam or the branch of a tree, their feet barely touching the ground, so that they are utterly powerless to resist; their clothes are turned over their heads, and their backs scarred with a leathern thong, either by the driver himself, or by father, brother, husband, or lover, if the driver choose to order it.  What a blessing for these poor heathen that they are brought to a Christian land!  When a band of pregnant women came to their master to implore relief from overwork, he seemed “positively degraded” to his wife, as he stood urging them to do their allotted tasks.  She began to fear lest she should cease to respect the man she loved; “for the details of slaveholding are so unmanly, letting alone every other consideration, that I know not how any one with the spirit of a man can condescend to them.”  The master gives a slave as a present to an overseer whose administration of the estate was agreeable to him.  The slave is intelligent and capable, the husband of a wife and the father of children, and they are all fondly attached to each other.  He passionately declares that he will kill himself rather than follow his new master and leave wife and children behind.  Roused by the storm of grief, the wife