e and admire the negro character? I, for one, confess
to almost an enthusiasm on the subject. The cheerful ring of their
songs at their daily tasks, their love for their masters and their
families, their politeness and good manners, their easily bought but
sincere gratitude, their deep-seated aristocracy--for your genuine
negro was a terrible aristocrat,--their pride in their own and their
master's dignity, together with their overflowing and never-failing
animal spirits, both during hours of labor and leisure, altogether,
made up an aggregation of joyous simplicity and fidelity--when not
perverted by harsh treatment--that to me was irresistible!

A remembrance of the seasons spent among them will perish only with
life. From the time of the ingathering of the crops, until after the
ushering in of the new year, was wont to be with them a season of
greater joy and festivity than with any other people on earth, of whom
it has been my lot to hear. In the glorious November nights of our
beneficent clime, after the first frosts had given a bracing sharpness
and a ringing clearness to the air, and lent that transparent blue to
the heavens through which the stars gleam like globes of sapphire,
when I have seen a hundred or more of them around the swelling piles
of corn, and heard their tuneful voices ringing with the chorus of
some wild refrain, I have thought I would rather far listen to them
than to any music ever sung to mortal ears; for it was the outpouring
of the hearts of happy and contented men, rejoicing over the abundance
which rewarded the labor of the closing year! And the listening, too,
has many a time and oft filled my bosom with emotions, and opened my
heart with charity and love toward this subject and dependent race,
such as no oratory, no rhetoric or minstrelsy in all this wide earth
could impart!

Nature ceased almost to feel fatigue in the joyous scenes which
followed. The fiddle and the banjo, animated as it would seem like
living things, literally knew no rest, night or day; while Terpichore
covered her face in absolute despair in the presence of that famous
_double-shuffle_ with which the long nights and "master's shoes" were
worn away together! . . . .

Who can forget the cook by whom his youthful appetite was fed? The
fussy, consequential old lady to whom I now refer, has often, during
my vagrant inroads into her rightful domains, boxed my infant jaws,
with an imperious, "Bress de Lord, git out of d