After the conversation had ceased, and the preacher gone out to call on Mrs. Daniels, Mrs. Young said to the maid, "Now, Hannah, brother Pinchen is gone; you get the cowhide, and I'll whip you well, for aggravating me as you did to-day. It seems as if I can never sit down to take a little comfort with the Lord, without the devil putting it into your head to cross me. I've no doubt, Hannah, that I'll miss going to heaven on your account; but I'll whip you well before I leave this world--that I will." The servant received a flogging, Mrs. Young felt easier, and I was in the kitchen amusing my fellow-slaves with telling over Mr. Pinchen's last experience. Here let me say, that we regarded the religious profession of the whites around us as a farce, and our master and mistress, together with their guest, as mere hypocrites. During the entire visit of the preacher, the servants had a joyful time over my representations of what was going on in the great house. The removal of my master's family and slaves to the centre of the State of Missouri about this time, caused some change in our condition. My young master, William, had now grown to be a stout boy of five years of age. No restraint thrown around him by the doctor or his wife, aunt Dolly, his nurse, not permitted to control any of his actions, William had become impudent, petulant, peevish, and cruel. Sitting at the tea table, he would often desire to make his entire meal out of the sweetmeats, the sugar-bowl, or the cake; and when mistress would not allow him to have them, he, in a fit of anger, would throw any thing within his reach at me; spoons, knives, forks, and dishes would be hurled at my head, accompanied with language such as would astonish any one not well versed in the injurious effects of slavery upon the rising generation. Thomas Jefferson, in 1788, in a letter to M. Warville, Paris, writing upon slavery, alludes to its influence upon the young as follows:-- "The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, GIVES LOOSE TO HIS WORST PASSIONS; and, thus _nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny_, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities." In the Virginia legislature, in the year 1832, Hon. Lewis Summers said,-- "A slave population exercises the _most pernicious influence_ upon the manners, habits, and character of those among whom it exists. _Lisping infancy_ learns the vocabulary of abusive epithets, and struts, the _embryo tyrant_ of its little domain. The consciousness of _superior destiny_ takes possession of his mind at its earliest dawning, and _love of power and rule_ 'grows with his growth and strengthens with his strength.' Unless enabled to rise above the operation of those powerful causes, _he enters the world with miserable notions of self-importance, and under the government of an unbridled temper_."