Of course Lady Nugent forgets that she was a very great lady, and that quite likely these wives and daughters of the planters were shy. They might have shown to greater advantage if she could have met them on equal terms. But she never did. She seems to have been a cheery soul, but I am afraid she was convinced she was made of very superior clay. She is always complaining that she finds “sad want of local matter or indeed any subject of conversation with them.” The manner of their speech, too, was bad. “The Creole language,” she says, “is not confined to the negroes. Many of the ladies who have not been educated in England speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words that is very tiresome, if not disgusting. I stood next to a lady one night, next to a window, and by way of saying something remarked that the air was much cooler than usual, to which she answered, “Yes, ma'am, him railly too fraish.'” Probably we should be surprised could we reincarnate them to find these ladies giving themselves all the airs of a _grande dame_, though they had less learning than any cook-maid nowadays, less than the little black boys and girls trotting along the steep and stony paths with slates on their heads to their daily school. But the lords and ladies of that time were hardly models of decorum. “I wish,” goes on this gossipy good lady who is very sure of herself and her own position in the world, “I wish Lord Balcarres” (the Governor whose place General Nugent was taking) “would wash his hands and use a nail brush, for the black edges of his nails really make me sick. He has, besides, an extraordinary propensity to dip his fingers into every dish. Yesterday he absolutely helped himself to some fricassee with his dirty finger and thumb.” And again, “We drove to Lord Balcarres' Penn. Never was such a scene of dirt and discomfort. Lord B. was in a sad fright, thinking we should expect breakfast. However, upon his secretary's whispering to me that there was but one whole teacup and a saucer and a half, we declared our intention of returning to the King's House, where a party was waiting for us to breakfast.” If that could be written of the King's representative of one of the premier colonies only thirty-five years before Queen Victoria came to the throne, what must we not forgive in the planters of a century earlier. Lady Nugent has a certain fearful joy in recounting the backslidings of the men of her day, which makes her most amusing reading, while it certainly throws a good deal of light on the manners and customs of her times.