Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/323

Rh “You shall have my keys, daddy, to lay on your neck, and then it will stop,” said Mrs. W. H., taking out her bunch of keys, and placing it on the neck of black daddy, and waiting awhile until it had produced the desired effect. Daddy thanked her heartily, but not as if for any unusual mark of kindness. Neither is such behaviour or such kindness shown by the whites to the blacks unusual either in the Slave States. But the institution of slavery causes the good and the bad master to be placed under the ban of one hatred; and yet they are as unlike as day and night.

My proposed journey through the northern parts of Georgia and Tennesee, like that of last year, must be wholly given up. The heat is oppressive; Tennesee River is dried up, so that it is not navigable for a steamer; and there is no other mode of conveyance for me, while the fatigue of diligences upon those wretched roads would be greater than I could support. I shall, therefore, also this time, confide myself to the sea, but merely for four-and-twenty hours, land in North Carolina and proceed through that State to Virginia. I shall probably take the same steamer northward as Mr. and Mrs. H.

I am perfectly well, my little heart, and my friends in Savannah and Charleston natter me with the assurance that I am grown younger in appearance, that I am wonderfully improved, and ascribe the change to the American climate (the worst climate under the sun for the renovating process). But I know better, and commend Cuba, and the good homes both here and there, before everything else. Blessings be upon them! But I have nevertheless become old in exterior, that I see and feel, and must prepare you for. The exertion of travelling, and the climate of the West, have left visible traces on me. I might tell you of something, however, which is renewed in me, but I dare not now.