It is worthy to note here, in justice to the old days of the Floridian society, a society now utterly extinct, and a subject of history, that the kindliness to the slaves was universal on the St. John's River. At nightfall they used to gather in their quarters and sing; and they had a peculiar yodel, which, starting from one plantation, was caught up by the others, and ran round and off along the river into the distance and back, going and coming again and again with a peculiar fascination, like the voice of a happy and careless common life. It was a kindly and indulgent community, and that it was a slave-holding society never forced itself on the attention. The lazy social virtues had, no doubt, their lazy vices, but we never saw them on the surface. The negro quarters were as merry as the day was long, and the negro was a more important and better appreciated element of social life than in the North. The whole valley joined in unreserved malediction of a planter, one of our neighbors, who had profited by the accidental burning of the free papers of a black family which had been bought out of slavery by the father, with money earned as pilot to the steamers of the United States Army during the Seminole War, to compel him to purchase himself and his wife and children again, and the thief was spoken of as the meanest of white men, out of the social pale of self-respecting folk; cheating a slave being far worse than cheating one of his own class. The old scoundrel was the reproach of the whole community; but no more formal indictment of the system of slavery, as established in the United States, is required than the fact that a former master could recall to slavery an emancipated slave family, the head of which had paid in hard cash for himself, his wife, and all his children, because his free papers had been burned, in a fire of which, moreover, the neighbors accused the former owner of being the incendiary. While those papers were in existence the negro could legally sue and be sued; but without them he had no more legal rights than a dog. The life which honest people lived in that primitive community was Arcadian, and it is probable that even in Arcadia they had slaves. Certainly, in my experience of living in many countries and under various systems, I have not found that the most primitive system secures the largest personal liberty; rather the contrary.