ss as they call it,
is not nearly so severe as here, in the rice and cotton lands of Georgia.
Another very pretty and pathetic tune began with words that seemed to
promise something sentimental--

Fare you well, and good-bye, oh, oh!
I'm goin' away to leave you, oh, oh!

but immediately went off into nonsense verses about gentlemen in the
parlour drinking wine and cordial, and ladies in the drawing-room drinking
tea and coffee, &c. I have heard that many of the masters and overseers on
these plantations prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage
nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of
sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might
be expected to make them especially excitable by any songs of a plaintive
character, and having any reference to their particular hardships. If it
is true, I think it a judicious precaution enough--these poor slaves are
just the sort of people over whom a popular musical appeal to their
feelings and passions would have an immense power.

In the evening, Mr. ----'s departure left me to the pleasures of an
uninterrupted _tete-a-tete_ with his crosseyed overseer, and I
endeavoured, as I generally do, to atone by my conversibleness and
civility for the additional trouble which, no doubt, all my outlandish
ways and notions are causing the worthy man. So suggestive (to use the
new-fangled jargon about books) a woman as myself is, I suspect, an
intolerable nuisance in these parts; and poor Mr. O---- cannot very well
desire Mr. ---- to send me away, however much he may wish that he would;
so that figuratively, as well as literally, I fear the worthy master _me
voit d'un mauvais oeil_, as the French say. I asked him several questions
about some of the slaves who had managed to learn to read, and by what
means they had been able to do so. As teaching them is strictly prohibited
by the laws, they who instructed them, and such of them as acquired the
knowledge, must have been not a little determined and persevering. This
was my view of the case, of course, and of course it was not the
overseer's. I asked him if many of Mr. ----'s slaves could read. He said
'No; very few, he was happy to say, but those few were just so many too
many.' 'Why, had he observed any insubordination in those who did?' And I
reminded him of Cooper London, the methodist preacher, whose performance
of the burial service had struck me so much some time ago--