This planter lived sixty miles from where I resided; yet ask a child, either white or black, who was a hard master, and the answer unhesitatingly was, 'Bulow is a hard master.' He had no family, and was shunned by every respectable white person who knew him. In fact, during the summer months that he resided off his plantation, he found it difficult to obtain board in any respectable hotel, so prejudiced were people against him. Public opinion is an ordeal that many men dare brave; but public abhorrence none but the most hardened can endure. A master cannot hide his cruelties; negroes have too much communication with each other, and with neighboring plantations, not to trumpet loudly their hardships; and abject as their condition is, they do not tamely submit to an encroachment upon their rights or privileges. Infringe either the one or the other, and they become as inveterate grumblers as John Bull himself. That magistrates are not always imbued with a sense of justice, we learn from that very respectable source, our spelling-book, in the story of the judge and the farmer; and a very little of every day's observation will prove to us that the species is not extinct. One of this class hired two negroes for two months, of a highly respectable planter in my neighborhood, to send with a partner about thirty miles distant, for the purpose of planting an orange grove. They had been absent about six weeks, when one of the men returned very unexpectedly to his master, complaining of ill treatment. He stated that they had been kept in the water for many days, in building a dock, with bad and scanty food; that he became sick, but being threatened, was obliged to work; and finally being unable to endure it any longer, he left his companion, and taking a canoe belonging to the firm, had returned home. His master felt for him, but urged his return till the expiration of the engagement. This the negro resolutely refused, saying he should only be whipped if he returned. The magistrate, on learning that one of the men had left his service, with bad accounts of the treatment he had received, instantly lodged him in jail on a charge of stealing the canoe. Nothing could be farther from the truth than this charge, and he knew it well; but he had long indulged a private pique against the owner of these slaves, who had more than once reproved his excesses. After keeping the man in jail for a week, he ordered him to receive forty lashes save one, on his naked back, for a crime he had never thought of committing. In vain the poor fellow protested his innocence; in vain his master offered to pay treble the price of the canoe; the sentence was awarded, and like Shylock, he would have his bond. The owner of these slaves, a near descendant of the learned and admirable Sir Alexander Crichton, was compelled to witness this violation of justice on the person of one of his household, and this too from a man who had fled from a northern city for defrauding his creditors.