A BUSINESS DAY AT CHEE-HA. 197 



rain by an umbrella! and is it this region which 

 the philanthropic abolitionist would people with, 

 white laborers ? The Asiatic cholera would not bo 

 more sweeping in its desolation, more unsparing or 

 more fatal than this pestilent malaria. Is not the 

 scheme of superseding slave labor in such a region 

 by free white labor, as insane and atrocious as that 

 of Lequinio, who proposed to perpetuate republican 

 principles by exterminating all of the human family 

 who were old enough to have imbibed the taint of 

 monarchy ? His benevolence would reach but one 

 generation of men, the wider philanthropy of the 

 abolitionist would reach even to extermination. 



I enter the barn-yard ; the driver doffs his hat 

 and draws a long scrape of the right foot by way of 

 welcome ; and the glossy-backed operatives hedge 

 me about with, a circle of flail sticks, by way of 

 salute. What greasy-looking rogues ! What a 

 contrast to the bloodless, fever-stricken being who 

 was placed there to superintend their labors ! The 

 dank vapors of the swamps, so baneful to him 

 had they served to nourish their grosser bodies ? 

 Had they fattened on the mere aroma of the rice, like 

 the poor Parisian on the fumes of the pastrycook 

 shop ? It was not that they had fed on it, surely, 

 for there stood their own ricks unthreshed. Could 

 they have stolen it? "The theft of a slave is no 



