eferred to him irresistibly
ludicrous:--'Massa, massa, you please to buy me a comb to tick in my
head?' Mr. ---- promised her this necessary of life, and I promised myself
to give her the luxury of one whole garment. Mrs. ---- has sent me the
best possible consolation for the lost mutton, some lovely flowers, and
these will not be stolen.

* * * * *

_Saturday, the 13th._--Dear E----, I rode to-day through all my woodpaths
for the last time with Jack, and I think I should have felt quite
melancholy at taking leave of them and him, but for the apparition of a
large black snake, which filled me with disgust and nipped my other
sentiments in the bud. Not a day passes now that I do not encounter one or
more of these hateful reptiles; it is curious how much more odious they
are to me than the alligators that haunt the mud banks of the river round
the rice plantation. It is true that there is something very dreadful in
the thick shapeless mass, uniform in colour almost to the black slime on
which it lies basking, and which you hardly detect till it begins to
move. But even those ungainly crocodiles never sickened me as those rapid,
lithe, and sinuous serpents do. Did I ever tell you that the people at the
rice plantation caught a young alligator and brought it to the house, and
it was kept for some time in a tub of water? It was an ill-tempered little
monster; it used to set up its back like a cat when it was angry, and open
its long jaws in a most vicious manner.

After looking at my new path in the pine land, I crossed Pike Bluff, and
breaking my way all through the burnt district, returned home by Jones's.
In the afternoon, we paid a long visit to Mr. C----. It is extremely
interesting to me to talk with him about the negroes; he has spent so much
of his life among them, has managed them so humanely, and apparently so
successfully, that his experience is worthy of all attention. And yet it
seems to me that it is impossible, or rather, perhaps, for those very
reasons it is impossible, for him ever to contemplate them in any
condition but that of slavery. He thinks them very like the Irish, and
instanced their subserviency, their flattering, their lying, and
pilfering, as traits common to the character of both peoples. But I cannot
persuade myself that in both cases, and certainly in that of the negroes,
these qualities are not in great measure the result of their condition. He
says that he