No better illustration of the unchaste and demoralizing character of slavery can be found, than is furnished in the fact that this professedly Christian slaveholder, amidst all his prayers and hymns, was shamelessly and boastfully encouraging, and actually compelling, in his own house, undisguised and unmitigated fornication, as a means of increasing his human stock.

I may remark here, that, while this fact will be read with disgust and shame at the north, it will be _laughed at_, as smart and praiseworthy in Mr.Covey, at the south; for a man is no more condemned there for buying a woman and devoting her to this life of dishonor,{170} than for buying a cow, and raising stock from her.

The same rules are observed, with a view to increasing the number and quality of the former, as of the latter.
I will here reproduce what I said of my own experience in this wretched place, more than ten years ago: If at any one time of my life, more than another, I was made to drink the bitterest dregs of slavery, that time was during the first six months of my stay with Mr.Covey.We were worked all weathers.

It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, snow, or hail too hard for us to work in the field.

Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than the night.