d Glasgow man, who
has been settled here many years. It is curious how many of the people
round this neighbourhood have Scotch names; it seems strange to find them
thus gathered in the vicinity of a new Darien; but those in our immediate
neighbourhood seem to have found it a far less fatal region than their
countrymen did its namesake of the Isthmus. Mr. C----'s house is a roomy,
comfortable, handsomely laid out mansion, to which he received me with
very cordial kindness, and where I spent part of a very pleasant morning,
talking with him, hearing all he could tell me of the former history of
Mr. ----'s plantation. His description of its former master, old
Major ----, and of his agent and overseer Mr. K----, and of that
gentleman's worthy son and successor the late overseer, interested me very
much; of the two latter functionaries his account was terrible, and much
what I had supposed any impartial account of them would be; because, let
the propensity to lying of the poor wretched slaves be what it will, they
could not invent, with a common consent, the things that they one and all
tell me with reference to the manner in which they have been treated by
the man who has just left the estate, and his father, who for the last
nineteen years have been sole sovereigns of their bodies and souls. The
crops have satisfied the demands of the owners, who, living in
Philadelphia, have been perfectly contented to receive a large income
from their estate without apparently caring how it was earned. The
stories that the poor people tell me of the cruel tyranny under which
they have lived are not complaints, for they are of things past and gone,
and very often, horridly as they shock and affect me, they themselves
seem hardly more than half conscious of the misery their condition
exhibits to me, and they speak of things which I shudder to hear of,
almost as if they had been matters of course with them.

Old Mr. C---- spoke with extreme kindness of his own people, and had
evidently bestowed much humane and benevolent pains upon endeavours to
better their condition. I asked him if he did not think the soil and
climate of this part of Georgia admirably suited to the cultivation of the
mulberry and the rearing of the silk-worm; for it has appeared to me that
hereafter, silk may be made one of the most profitable products of this
whole region: he said that that had long been his opinion, and he had at
one time had it much at heart to try the