, you no hear me
call. Oh missis! me call, me cry, and me run; make me a gown like dat. Do,
for massy's sake, only make me a gown like dat.' This modest request for a
riding habit in which to hoe the cotton fields served for an introduction
to sundry other petitions for rice and sugar and flannel, all which I
promised the petitioner, but not the 'gown like dat;' whereupon I rode
off, and she flung herself down in the middle of the road to get her wind
and rest.

The passion for dress is curiously strong in these people, and seems as
though it might be made an instrument in converting them, outwardly at any
rate, to something like civilisation; for though their own native taste
is decidedly both barbarous and ludicrous, it is astonishing how very soon
they mitigate it in imitation of their white models. The fine figures of
the mulatto women in Charleston and Savannah are frequently as elegantly
and tastefully dressed as those of any of their female superiors; and here
on St. Simon's, owing, I suppose, to the influence of the resident lady
proprietors of the various plantations, and the propensity to imitation in
their black dependents, the people that I see all seem to me much tidier,
cleaner, and less fantastically dressed than those on the rice plantation,
where no such influences reach them.

On my return from my ride I had a visit from Captain F----, the manager
of a neighbouring plantation, with whom I had a long conversation about
the present and past condition of the estate, the species of feudal
magnificence in which its original owner, Major ----, lived, the iron
rule of old overseer K---- which succeeded to it, and the subsequent
sovereignty of his son, Mr. R---- K----, the man for whom Mr. ----
entertains such a cordial esteem, and of whom every account I receive
from the negroes seems to me to indicate a merciless sternness of
disposition that may be a virtue in a slave-driver, but is hardly a
Christian grace. Captain F---- was one of our earliest visitors at the
rice plantation on our arrival, and I think I told you of his mentioning,
in speaking to me of the orange trees which formerly grew all round the
dykes there, that he had taken Basil Hall there once in their blossoming
season, and that he had said the sight was as well worth crossing the
Atlantic for as Niagara. To-day he referred to that again. He has resided
for a great many years on a plantation here, and is connected with our
neighbour, old Mr.