nigger loose, order him to make off, and tell his master to catch his own niggers.
Sunday.—I rode on, during the cool of the morning, about eight miles, and stopped for the day, at a house pleasantly situated by a small stream, among wooded hills. During the forenoon, seven men and three women, with their children, gathered at the house. All of them, I concluded, were non-slaveholders, as was our host himself; though, as one told me, "with his five boys he makes a heap more crop than Mrs. , who's got forty niggers." "How is that?" "Well, she's a woman, and she can't make the niggers work; she won't have a overseer, and niggers won't work, you know, unless there's somebody to drive 'em."
Our host, when I arrived, had just been pulling weeds out of his potato patch, which he mentioned as an apology for not being a little clean, like the rest.
Beside the company I have mentioned, and the large family of the house, there was another traveller and myself to dinner, and three bountiful tables were spread, one after another.
The traveller was said to be a Methodist preacher, but gave no indication of it, except that he said grace before meat, and used the Hebrew word for Sunday. He was, however, a man of superior intelligence to the others, who were ignorant and stupid, though friendly and communicative. He asked me "what a good nigger man could be bought for in New York;" he didn't seem surprised, or make any further inquiry, when I told him we had no slaves there. Some asked me much about crops, and when I told them that my crops of wheat for six years had averaged twenty-eight bushels, and that I had once reaped forty from a single acre, they were amazed beyond expression, and anxious to know how I "put
