is at night, after their labour is
over, having worked, at the _very least_, six hours without intermission
of rest or refreshment since their noon-day meal (properly so called, for
'tis meal, and nothing else). Those that I passed to-day, sitting on their
doorsteps, or on the ground round them eating, were the people employed at
the mill and threshing-floor. As these are near to the settlement, they
had time to get their food from the cook-shop. Chairs, tables, plates,
knives, forks, they had none; they sat, as I before said, on the earth or
doorsteps, and ate either out of their little cedar tubs, or an iron pot,
some few with broken iron spoons, more with pieces of wood, and all the
children with their fingers. A more complete sample of savage feeding, I
never beheld. At one of the doors I saw three young girls standing, who
might be between sixteen and seventeen years old; they had evidently done
eatings and were rudely playing and romping with each other, laughing and
shouting like wild things. I went into the house, and such another
spectacle of filthy disorder I never beheld. I then addressed the girls
most solemnly, showing them that they were wasting in idle riot the time
in which they might be rendering their abode decent, and told them that it
was a shame for any woman to live in so dirty a place, and so beastly a
condition. They said they had seen buckree (white) women's houses just as
dirty, and they could not be expected to be cleaner than white women. I
then told them that the only difference between themselves and buckree
women was, that the latter were generally better informed, and, for that
reason alone, it was more disgraceful to them to be disorderly and dirty.
They seemed to listen to me attentively, and one of them exclaimed, with
great satisfaction, that they saw I made no difference between them and
white girls, and that they never had been so treated before. I do not know
anything which strikes me as a more melancholy illustration of the
degradation of these people, than the animal nature of their recreations
in their short seasons of respite from labour. You see them, boys and
girls, from the youngest age to seventeen and eighteen, rolling, tumbling,
kicking, and wallowing in the dust, regardless alike of decency, and
incapable of any more rational amusement; or, lolling, with half-closed
eyes, like so many cats and dogs, against a wall, or upon a bank in the
sun, dozing away their short leisure