Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/349

Rh train which conveyed certainly two thousand persons, two-thirds of them blacks. They sang the whole way, and were in high spirits.

The next morning, with a little basket of bananas and sponge-cake, which my kind hostess and friend Mrs. W. H. provided for me, I was on my way to Savannah. She herself accompanied me on board the steam-boat, and would willingly have accompanied me the whole journey: and how willingly would I have had her with me! She is one of the persons with whom I can get on extremely well. But I set off alone, with her fruit and a bouquet of flowers from Mrs. Holbrook. Yet I was not alone, for my heart was full of many things. The day was glorious, and the vessel steamed up the Savannah, which, with a thousand windings, flows between verdant shores, which, though flat, are ornamented with charming woods and plantations, with their large mansions and pretty little slave villages, so that the whole was like a refreshing pleasure trip. True, the slave villages are not a gladdening sight, but I have hitherto seen far more happy than unhappy slaves, and therefore I have not as yet a gloomy impression of their condition here.

The crew of this little steamboat consisted merely of slaves, blacks, and mulattoes. The captain told me that they were very happy, as well as faithful and clever.

“That man,” said he, indicating with his glance an elderly man, a mulatto, with a remarkably handsome, but as it seemed to me, melancholy countenance, “is my favourite servant, and I need wish for no other as caretaker and friend by my death-bed.” The crew appeared to be well fed and cared for. A handsome and fat mulatto woman said to me, in an under tone, when we were alone,—

“What do you say about the institution of slavery here in the South?”