nts of your informant, and I regret to be obliged to record the
facts by which alone I can do so. 'Work,' continues your authority, 'began
at six in the morning, at nine an hour's rest was allowed for breakfast,
and by two or three o'clock the day's work was done.' Certainly this was a
pattern plantation, and I can only lament that my experience lay amid such
far less favourable circumstances. The negroes among whom I lived went to
the fields at daybreak, carrying with them their allowance of food, which
toward noon, and not till then, they ate, cooking it over a fire which
they kindled as best they could where they were working; their _second_
meal in the day was at night after their labour was over, having worked at
the _very least_ six hours without rest or refreshment, since their
noon-day meal--properly so called, indeed, for it was meal and nothing
else, or a preparation something thicker than porridge, which they call
hominy. Perhaps the candid observer, whose report of the estate he visited
appeared to you so consolatory, would think that this diet contrasted
favourably with that of potato and butter-milk fed Irish labourers. But a
more just comparison surely would be with the mode of living of the
labouring population of the United States, the peasantry of Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, or indeed with the condition of those
very potato and butter-milk fed Irishmen when they have exchanged their
native soil for the fields of the Northern and North-Western States, and
when, as one of them once was heard to say, it was no use writing home
that he got meat three times a-day, for nobody in Ireland would believe
it. The next item in the list of commendation is the hospital, which your
informant also visited, and of which he gives the following account--'It
consisted of three separate wards, all clean and well ventilated: one was
for lying-in women, who were invariably allowed a month's rest after their
confinement.' Permit me to place beside this picture that of a Southern
infirmary, such as I saw it, and taken on the spot. In the first room that
I entered I found only half of the windows, of which there were six,
glazed; these were almost as much obscured with dirt as the other
windowless ones were darkened by the dingy shutters which the shivering
inmates had closed in order to protect themselves from the cold. In the
enormous chimney glimmered the powerless embers of a few chips of wood,
round which as many o