"When I recommended care of and attention to my negros in sickness, it was that the first stage of, and the whole progress through the disorders with which they might be seized (if more than a slight indisposition) should be closely watched, and timely applications and remedies be administered; especially in the pleurisies, and all inflammatory disorders accompanied with pain, when a few day's neglect, or want of bleeding might render the ailment incurable. In such cases sweeten'd teas, broths and (according to the nature of the complaint, and the doctor's prescription) sometimes a little wine, may be necessary to nourish and restore the patient; and these I am perfectly willing to allow, when it is requisite." Yet again he complains that the overseers "seem to consider a Negro much in the same light as they do the brute beasts, on the farms, and often times treat them as inhumanly." His slaves by no means led lives of luxury and inglorious ease. A friendly Polish poet who visited Mount Vernon in 1798 was shocked by the poor quarters and rough food provided for them. He wrote: "We entered some negroes' huts--for their habitations cannot be called houses. They are far more miserable than the poorest of the cottages of our peasants. The husband and his wife sleep on a miserable bed, the children on the floor. A very poor chimney, a little kitchen furniture amid this misery--a tea-kettle and cups.... A small orchard with vegetables was situated close to the hut. Five or six hens, each with ten or fifteen chickens, walked there. That is the only pleasure allowed to the negroes: they are not permitted to keep either ducks or geese or pigs." Yet all the slaves he saw seemed gay and light-hearted and on Sundays played at pitching the bar with an activity and zest that indicated that they managed to keep from being overworked and found some enjoyment in life. To our Farmer's orderly and energetic soul his shiftless lazy blacks were a constant trial. In his diary for February, 1760, he records that four of his carpenters had only hewed about one hundred twenty feet of timber in a day, so he tried the experiment of sitting down and watching them. They at once fell to with such energy and worked so rapidly that he concluded that each one ought to hew about one hundred twenty-five feet per day and more when the days were longer. A later set of carpenters seem to have been equally trifling, for of them he said in 1795: "There is not to be found so idle a set of Rascals.--In short, it appears to me, that to make even a chicken coop, would employ all of them a week."