last wrote to you, but I must beg you to excuse it. I have had more than a
usual amount of small daily occupations to fill my time; and, as a mere
enumeration of these would not be very interesting to you, I will tell you
a story which has just formed an admirable illustration for my observation
of all the miseries of which this accursed system of slavery is the cause,
even under the best and most humane administration of its laws and usages.
Pray note it, my dear friend, for you will find, in the absence of all
voluntary or even conscious cruelty on the part of the master, the best
possible comment on a state of things which, without the slightest desire
to injure and oppress, produces such intolerable results of injury and
oppression.

We have, as a sort of under nursemaid and assistant of my dear M----,
whose white complexion, as I wrote you, occasioned such indignation to my
southern fellow-travellers, and such extreme perplexity to the poor slaves
on our arrival here, a much more orthodox servant for these parts, a young
woman named Psyche, but commonly called Sack, not a very graceful
abbreviation of the divine heathen appellation: she cannot be much over
twenty, has a very pretty figure, a graceful gentle deportment, and a face
which, but for its colour (she is a dingy mulatto), would be pretty, and
is extremely pleasing, from the perfect sweetness of its expression; she
is always serious, not to say sad and silent, and has altogether an air of
melancholy and timidity, that has frequently struck me very much, and
would have made me think some special anxiety or sorrow must occasion it,
but that God knows the whole condition of these wretched people naturally
produces such a deportment, and there is no necessity to seek for special
or peculiar causes to account for it. Just in proportion as I have found
the slaves on this plantation intelligent and advanced beyond the general
brutish level of the majority, I have observed this pathetic expression of
countenance in them, a mixture of sadness and fear, the involuntary