They tell me the niggers won't work if you don't thrash them, and I don't wonder, when I think of the heat of the climate; but sure if they've more idleness, they ought to get less money; and lastly, I take the Abolitionists--bother it for a long word!--on their own ground, and are they prepared to say that if you impose a duty on slave sugar, the Cubans and the rest of them won't only take more out of the niggers to meet "the exigency of the market," as the newspapers call it? If they do so, they 'll only be imitating our own farmers since the repeal of the corn law. "You must bestir yourselves," says Lord Stanley; "competition with the foreigner will demand all your activity. It won't do to go on as you used. You must buy guano, take to drainage, study Smith of Deanstown, and mind the rotation of your crops." Don't you think that some enlightened Cuban will hit upon the same train of argument, and make a fresh investment in whipcord? Ah, Tom! these are only party squabbles, after all; and so I told Vickars. I don't know why, but it always seemed to me that the blacks absorb a very unfair amount of our loose sympathies; whether it's the color of them, or that they 're so far away, or because they 're naked, I never knew; but certain it is, we pity them far more than our own people, and I back myself to get up a ladies' committee for a nigger question, before you collect three people to hear you discuss a home grievance. I have just been interrupted to receive Monsieur Jellicot, my defender in action No. 3, a suit preferred by my late courier, "François Tehetuer, born in the canton of Zug, aged thirty-seven years, single, and a Protestant, against Monsieur Kenyidod, natif d'Irlande, près de Dublin, dans le Royaume de la Grande Bretagne," &c., &c.; the demand being for a year's wages, bed, board, and travelling expenses to his native country. He, the aforesaid François, having been sent away for a disgraceful riot in my house, in which he beat Pat, the other servant, and smashed about five-and-twenty pounds' worth of glass and china. A very pretty claim, Tom,--the preliminary resistance to which has already cost me about one hundred and fifty francs to remove the litigation into an upper court, where the bribery is higher, and consequently deemed more within the reach of _my_ finances than those of honest Francis!