overseer

I had a plantation on the peninsula, and I wanted a white overseer. You never get any work out of the natives unless you have a white man over them.

'She was brought here last night,' replied the old woman, 'by the overseer's order.

In another field, beyond the pasture, a dozen slaves were at work under an overseer.

"Can a sleigh pass?" he asked his overseer, a venerable man, resembling his master in manners and looks, who was accompanying him back to the house.

Dat woman warn't satisfied even wid dat, but she worked up de overseer ag'in' me, she 'uz dat jealous en hateful; so de overseer he had me out befo' day in de mawnin's en worked me de whole long day as long as dey'uz any light to see by; en many's de lashin's I got 'ca'se I couldn't come up to de work o' de stronges'.

But now I have also read "The Station Overseer" in your little volume; and it is wonderful to think that one may live and yet be ignorant of the fact that under one's very nose there may be a book in which one's whole life is described as in a picture.

In the course of his Narrative, he relates two in- stances of murderous cruelty,--in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging to a neigh- boring plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his lordly domain in quest of fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out the brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape a bloody scourging.

The overseer lives with them, and has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his heels.

"Besides all, he had an overseer,--great, tall, slab-sided, two-fisted renegade son of Vermont--(begging your pardon),--who had gone through a regular apprenticeship in hardness and brutality and taken his degree to be admitted to practice.

The same order which I have directed here should be observed also in the country; for there also their magistrates such as the surveyors of the woods and overseers of the grounds, must necessarily have their common tables and their towers, for the purpose of protection against an enemy.

The answers were all based on official data furnished by governors and heads of churches, and founded on the reports of district magistrates and ecclesiastical superintendents, founded in their turn on the reports of parochial overseers and parish priests; and so all of these answers were unhesitating and certain.

There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them.