learning to rule despotically your fellow creatures before the first
lesson of self-government has been well spelt over! It makes me tremble;
but I shall find a remedy, or remove myself and the child from this
misery and ruin.

You cannot conceive anything more grotesque than the Sunday trim of the
poor people; their ideality, as Mr. Combe would say, being, I should
think, twice as big as any rational bump in their head. Their Sabbath
toilet really presents the most ludicrous combination of incongruities
that you can conceive--frills, flounces, ribbands, combs stuck in their
woolly heads, as if they held up any portion of the stiff and ungovernable
hair, filthy finery, every colour in the rainbow, and the deepest possible
shades blended in fierce companionship round one dusky visage, head
handkerchiefs, that put one's very eyes out from a mile off, chintzes with
sprawling patterns, that might be seen if the clouds were printed with
them--beads, bugles, flaring sashes, and above all, little fanciful
aprons, which finish these incongruous toilets with a sort of airy grace,
which I assure you is perfectly indescribable. One young man, the eldest
son and heir of our washerwoman Hannah, came to pay his respects to me in
a magnificent black satin waistcoat, shirt gills which absolutely
engulphed his black visage, and neither shoes nor stockings on his feet.

Among our visitors from St. Simons to-day was Hannah's mother (it seems to
me that there is not a girl of sixteen on the plantations but has
children, nor a woman of thirty but has grandchildren). Old House Molly,
as she is called, from the circumstance of her having been one of the
slaves employed in domestic offices during Major ----'s residence on the
island, is one of the oldest and most respected slaves on the estate, and
was introduced to me by Mr. ---- with especial marks of attention and
regard; she absolutely embraced him, and seemed unable sufficiently to