Says the stanza which Dr. Johnson was so fond of quoting, and really it is
so good that I will transcribe the whole of it -
"Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound -
All at her work the village maiden sings,
Nor, while she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things."
Verse it seems can sweeten the toil of slaves in a tobacco factory.
"We encourage their singing as much as we can," said the brother of the
proprietor, himself a diligent masticator of the weed, who attended us,
and politely explained to us the process of making plug tobacco; "we
encourage it as much as we can, for the boys work better while singing.
Sometimes they will sing all day long with great spirit; at other times
you will not hear a single note. They must sing wholly of their own
accord, it is of no use to bid them do it."
"What is remarkable," he continued, "their tunes are all psalm tunes, and
the words are from hymn-books; their taste is exclusively for sacred
music; they will sing nothing else. Almost all these persons are
church-members; we have not a dozen about the factory who are not so. Most
of them are of the Baptist persuasion; a few are Methodists."
I saw in the course of the day the Baptist church in which these people
worship, a low, plain, but spacious brick building, the same in which the
sages of Virginia, a generation of great men, debated the provisions of
the constitution.
