32 TlMEHRI. 
two Dutch ladies upon the road, travelling in great state 
in a chair drawn by six naked slaves, instead of horses.' 
Sometimes if the slave-owner had temporarily no 
personal occasion for the services of his slaves he pru- 
dently made money by them ; for example, PlNCKARD — 
" was witness to a gentleman calling up one of his slaves into 
the breakfast room, and giving him orders to go with three others into 
the fields, the highways or the woods, and cut grass, to sell in the town, 
charging him to recollect that it was at the pain of a flogging if they 
did not each bring home four bitts* at night, and adding, by way 
of encouragement, that if they could gain more they might keep the 
surplus for themselves. They went out, each taking a long knife and a 
string, and they returned punctually in the evening with the sixteen 
bitts." 
Other men owned gangs of slaves for the sole 
purpose of hiring them out to such persons as might 
temporarily require their services. 
Up to this point the description of slavery which I have 
drawn from the letters of PlNCKARD must have given al- 
most unrelieved pain to the mind of the reader. But 
there was another, and a happier side from which the 
subject may be viewed. As in after times it happened 
that the evil which white men originally did in enslaving 
black men was, through an overpowering sense of this 
terrible side and a blind ignorance of this better side, 
crowned and made irrevocable by the harm white men 
wrought by their method of freeing these slaves, when, 
in a future chapter, I have to speak of this emancipation 
of the slaves it will be most useful to be able to refer not 
only to the worse, but also to the better side of slavery as 
it existed in the years of which I am now writing. Both 
sides are most vividly shown in many passages by PlNCK- 
* A bitt=5d. 
