'Truly I am sorry for you; but what alteration would you have made in
the slave-laws?'

'I would empower bailiffs to slay upon the spot all slaves whom they
thought disorderly, as an example to the rest!'

'What would such a permission avail you? These creatures are
necessary, and such a law would exterminate them in a few months. Can
you not break their spirit with labour, bind their strength with
chains, and vanquish their obstinacy with dungeons?'

'All this I have done, but they die under the discipline, or escape
from their prisons. I have now three hundred slaves on my patron's
estates. Against those born on our lands I have little to urge. Many
of them, it is true, begin the day with weeping and end it with death;
but for the most part, thanks to their diurnal allowance of stripes,
they are tolerably submissive. It is with the wretches that I have
been obliged to purchase from prisoners of war and the people of
revolted towns that I am so dissatisfied. Punishments have no effect
on them, they are incessantly indolent, sulky, desperate. It was but
the other day that ten of them poisoned themselves while at work in the
fields, and fifty more, after setting fire to a farm-house while my
back was turned, escaped to join a gang of their companions, who are
now robbers in the woods. These fellows, however, are the last of the
troop who will perpetrate such offences. With the concurrence of my
patron, I have adopted a plan that will henceforth tame them
efficiently!'

'Are you at liberty to communicate it?'

'By the keys of St. Peter, I wish I could see it practised on every
estate in the land! It is this:--Near a sulphur lake at some distance
from my farm-house is a tract of marshy ground, overspread here and
there by the ruins of an ancient slaughter-house. I propose to dig in
this place several subterranean caverns, each of which shall be capable
of holding twenty men. Here my mutinous slaves shall sleep after their
day's labour. The entrances shall be closed until morning with a large
stone, on which I will have engraven this inscription: 'These are the
dormitories invented by Gordian, bailiff of Saturninus, a nobleman, for
the reception of refractory slaves.'

'Your plan is ingenious; but I suspect your slaves (so insensible to
hardships are the brutal herd) will sleep as unconcernedly in their new
dormitories as in their old.'

'Sleep! It will be a most original species of repose that they