“For my own part, I think they’re better off in jail than they would be on the wharf,” continued Grimshaw.  “They’re a worthless set, and ha’n’t half the character that a majority of our slaves have; and instead of attending the captain on board, they’d be into Elliot street, spending their money, getting drunk, and associating with our worst niggers.  And they all know so much about law, that they’re always teaching our bad niggers the beauties of their government, which makes them more unhappy than they are.  Our niggers are like a shoal of fish—­when one becomes diseased, he spreads it among all the rest; and before you know where you are, they’re done gone.”

“They’re not very profitable customers for us, Sheriff,” said Dusenberry.  “We have a deal of watching, and a mighty smart lot of trouble after we get them fellows; and if we get a perquisite, it never amounts to much, for I seldom knew one that had money enough to treat as we took him up.  These Britishers a’n’t like us; they don’t pay off in port and if the fellows get any thing in jail from the consul, it’s by drib-drabs, that a’n’t no good, for it all goes for liquor.  And them criminals make a dead haul upon a black steward, as soon as he is locked up.  But if these sympathizing fools follow up their bugbears about the treatment at the jail, they’ll get things so that our business won’t be worth a dollar.  For my own part, I’m not so much beholdin’, for I’ve made myself comfortable within the last few years, but I want my son to succeed me in the office.  But if this consul of their’n keeps up his objections, appeals, and his protests in this way, and finds such men as his honor the district-attorney to second him with his nonsense and his notions, folks of our business might as well move north of Mason and Dixon’s.”

“I can wake him up to a point,” said Grimshaw, “that that abolition consul ha’n’t learnt before; and if he’d stuck his old petition in Charles Sumner’s breeches pocket instead of sending it to our legislature, he might have saved his old-womanish ideas from the showing’ up that Myzeck gave ’em.  It takes Myzeck to show these blue-skin Yankees how to toe the mark when they come to South Carolina.  If South Carolina should secede, I’d say give us Myzeck and Commander to lead our war, and we’d be as sure to whip ’em as we won the Mexican war for the Federal Government.  There is three things about an Englishman, Dusenberry, which you may mark for facts.  He is self-conceited, and don’t want to be advised;—­he thinks there is no law like the law of England, and that the old union-jack is a pass-book of nations;—­and he thinks everybody’s bound to obey his notions of humanity and the dictates of his positive opinions.  But what’s worse than all, they’ve never seen the sovereignty of South Carolina carried out, and according to Consul Mathew’s silly notions, they think we could be licked by a gun-boat.