breast,
and a child as young as S----, to travel upwards of a thousand miles, in
this half-civilized country, and through the least civilized part of it,
was no joke. However, happily, it was accomplished safely, though not
without considerable suffering and heart-achings on my part.... These
and other befallings may serve for talking matter, if ever we should
meet again. We all arrived here safely on Sunday last, and my thoughts
are engrossed with the condition of these people, from whose labor we
draw our subsistence; of which, now that I am here, I feel ashamed.

The place itself is one of the wildest corners of creation--if, indeed,
any part of this region can be considered as thoroughly _created_ yet.
It is not consolidated, but in mere process of formation,--a sort of
hasty-pudding of amphibious elements, composed of a huge, rolling river,
thick and turbid with mud, and stretches of mud banks, forming quaking
swamps, scarcely reclaimed from the water. The river wants _straining_
and the land draining, to make either of them properly wet or dry.

This island, which is only a portion of our Georgia estate, contains
several thousand acres, and is about eight miles round, and formed of
nothing but the deposits (leavings, in fact) of the Altamaha, whose
brimming waters, all thick with alluvial matter, roll round it, and
every now and then threaten to submerge it. The whole island is swamp,
dyked like the Netherlands, and trenched and divided by ditches and a
canal, by means of which the rice-fields are periodically overflowed,
and the harvest transported to the threshing mills. A duck, an eel, or a
frog might live here as in Paradise; but a creature of dry habits
naturally pines for less wet. To mount a horse is, of course,
impossible, and the only place where one can walk is the banks or dykes
that surround the island, and the smaller ones that divide the
rice-fields.

I mean to take to rowing, boats being plentiful, and "water, water
everywhere"; indeed, in spring, the overseer tells me we may have to go
from house to house in boats, the whole island being often flooded at
that season.

There is neither shade nor shelter, tree nor herbage, round our
residence, though there is no reason why there should not be; for the
climate is delicious, and the swampy borders of the mainland are full of
every kind of evergreen--magnolias, live oak (a species of ilex),
orange-trees, etc., and trailing shrubs, with varnished lea