ites procure the intellectual progress of the blacks to their own
endangerment, was, as you will easily believe, a significant chapter to me
in the black history of oppression which is laid before my eyes in this
place.]

Yesterday afternoon I received a visit from the wife of our neighbour Dr.
T----. As usual, she exclaimed at my good fortune in having a white woman
with my children when she saw M----, and, as usual, went on to expatiate
on the utter impossibility of finding a trustworthy nurse anywhere in the
South, to whom your children could be safely confided for a day or even an
hour; as usual too, the causes of this unworthiness or incapacity for a
confidential servant's occupation were ignored, and the fact laid to the
natural defects of the negro race. I am sick and weary of this cruel and
ignorant folly. This afternoon I went out to refresh myself with a row on
the broad Altamaha and the conversation of my slave Jack, which is, I
assure you, by no means devoid of interest of various kinds, pathetic and
humorous. I do not know that Jack's scientific information is the most
valuable in the world, and I sometimes marvel with perhaps unjust
incredulity at the facts in natural history which he imparts to me; for
instance, to-day he told me as we rowed past certain mud islands, very
like children's mud puddings on a rather larger scale than usual, that
they were inaccessible, and that it would be quite impossible to land on
one of them even for the shortest time. Not understanding why people who
did not mind being up to their knees in mud should not land there if they
pleased, I demurred to his assertion, when he followed it up by assuring
me that there were what he called sand-sinks under the mud, and that
whatever was placed on the surface would not only sink through the mud,
but also into a mysterious quicksand of unknown depth and extent below it.
This may be true, but sounds very strange, although I remember that the
frequent occurrence of large patches of quicksand was found to be one of
the principal impediments in the way of the canal speculators at
Brunswick. I did not, however, hear that these sinks, as Jack called them,
were found below a thick stratum of heavy mud.

In remonstrating with him upon the want of decent cleanliness generally
among the people, and citing to him one among the many evils resulting
from it, the intolerable quantity of fleas in all the houses, he met me
full with another fact in n