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I have hitherto given to the word melody its technical signification of a negroic song. Of course, here, it has its ordinary meaning.

Rosa Lee, if such a personage had ever existed, would have been known as "Massa Lee's Rosa." The prevailing ignorance at the North on the subject of negro names is remarkable and amusing. They seldom have pretty or common appellations, as they impose on their owners the office—on some plantations no sinecure—of dispensing the nomenclature; and as the gentlemen are naturally unwilling to confer upon a slave a name borne by some member of the family or some friend. The fruitfulness of the women on the place of a planter whom I once visited, had on one occasion exhausted his vocabulary. "Please Massa," said a hand to him one morning before he was out of bed, "Clementine sent me to ask you for a name. She had a little boy, last night." "Call him Last Night," said my friend, lazily catching at the last words; and "Last Night" he is, and will remain until the shadows of the last night of all shall gather round him. He blacked my boots, and it struck me as a curious anomaly to rise in the morning, and call for Last Night. It seemed as if, like the last poet out, I was "summoning before me the dark past."

Hallam's Middle Ages, Chapter ix, Part 1.