Page:A hairdresser's experience in high life.djvu/40

42 visit Dr. O., an uncle of the lady, who was very wealthy, and lived in style. A little to my surprise, I was treated very kindly; the whole household, old ladies, young ladies, gentlemen, and even the children and servants all treated me as kindly as if I had lived among them for years.

Dr. O. had a great many slaves, and was very kind to them. Many of these slaves worked on a farm, and every Saturday night on their coming in he would give them something, if only a quarter, as an encouragement to work, and they seemed to work through love and not through fear. They were very bright and intelligent, notwithstanding they came from North Carolina, where it is generally known that the poor whites and oppressed slaves are proverbially ignorant; so much so, that an old white woman, once, at a great meeting, when the preacher was trying to impress on the minds of his congregation their duty to God, and what he had done for them, and ended by saying, Christ died for them,—started up and said, "Why, brother, is Christ dead; when did he die?" Dr. O.'s servants, however, were not of this character; they were all very intelligent, and I was quite astonished at the amount of general information displayed by many of them. But although the servants in this family were well treated and happy, in the neighborhood were masters of a very different character from that of the kind Dr. Often very early in the morning I went out walking with Dr. O.'s daughter. During one of these walks, while passing near the residence of a gentlemen in the neighborhood, our attention was attracted by screams and groans; stopping, we peeped through the fence, and discovered