So Prodigal Are These Poor Deluded Creatures Of Their Money, That, Although Slaves And Liable To Immediate Sale At The

Caprice of their keepers, they have often been known to spend in one afternoon 200 dollars in a shopping excursion.

Endowed with natural talents, they are readily instructed in every accomplishment, requisite to constitute them charming companions. Often as a carriage dashes by, the pedestrian is able to catch a glimpse of some jewelled and turbaned sultana, of dazzling beauty, attended by her maid, who does not always possess a sinecure, for the mistress is often haughty, proud, and petulant, very hard to please, and exacts great deference from her inferiors. Many of them live in regal splendour, and everything that wealth and pampered luxury can bestow is theirs, as long as their personal charms remain; but when their beauty has ceased to gratify the passions of their masters, they are, in most instances, cast off, and frequently die in a condition which presents the greatest possible contrast to their former gay but not happy life.

"Oh that they had earlier died, Sleeping calmly side by side, Where the tyrant's power is o'er, And the fetter galls no more."

Many of such poor outcasts are to be found scattered all over the slave states, some employed as field hands, but in general they are selected as domestics, their former habits of luxury and ease rendering their constitutions too delicate for the exposure of ordinary field labour. It is not, however, as the reader will have observed, commiseration that saves them from that degradation.

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