nt mongrel appearance.

Now, dear, I have answered as many of your questions as my paper allows.
Do not, I beseech you, send me back word that my letter was "thoroughly
unsatisfactory."

God bless you.

I am ever your affectionate
F. A. B.

BRANCHTOWN, Wednesday, October 5th.
MY DEAREST H----,

It is a great disappointment to me that I am not going to the South this
winter. There is no house, it seems, on the plantation but a small
cottage, inhabited by the overseer, where the two gentlemen proprietors
can be accommodated, but where there is no room for me, my baby, and her
nurse, without unhousing the poor overseer and his family altogether.
The nearest town to the estate, Brunswick, is fifteen miles off, and a
wretched hole, where I am assured it will be impossible to obtain a
decent lodging for me, so that it has been determined to leave me and
baby behind, and the owner will go with his brother, but without us, on
his expedition to Negroland. As far as the child is concerned, I am well
satisfied; ... but I would undergo much myself to be able to go among
those people. I know that my hands would be in a great measure tied. I
certainly could not free them, nor could I even pay them for their
labor, or try to instruct them, even to the poor degree of teaching them
to read. But mere personal influence has a great efficiency; moral
revolutions of the world have been wrought by those who neither wrote
books nor read them; the Divinest Power was that of One Character, One
Example; that Character and Example which we profess to call our Rule of
life. The power of individual personal qualities is really the great
power, for good or evil, of the world; and it is upon this ground that I
feel convinced that, in spite of all the cunningly devised laws by which
the negroes are walled up in a mental and moral prison, from which there
is apparently no issue, the personal character and daily influence of a
few Christian men and women living among them would put an end to
slavery, more speedily and effectually than any other means whatever.

You do not know how profoundly this subject interests me, and engrosses
my thoughts: it is not alone the cause of humanity that so powerfully
affects my mind; it is, above all, the deep responsibility in which we
are involved, and which makes it a matter of su