the year here, and indescribably beautiful....

Good-bye, dearest Harriet; I had hoped to have joined you and Emily at
Bannisters, but that pretty plan is all rubbed out now, and I do not
know when I shall see you; but, thanks to those blessed beings--the
steam-ships, those Atlantic angels of speed and certainty, it now seems
as if I could do so "at any moment." God bless you.

Yours ever,
F. A. B.

BUTLER PLACE, October 26th.

I beg you will not stop short, as in your last letter, received the day
before yesterday, dearest Harriet, with "but I will not overwhelm you
with questions:" it is particularly agreeable to me to have specific
questions to answer in the letters I receive from you, and I hope you
perceive that I do religiously reply to anything in the shape of a
query. It is pleasant to me to know upon what particular points of my
doing, being, and suffering you desire to be enlightened; because
although I know everything I write to you interests you, I like to be
able to satisfy even a few of those "I wonders" that are perpetually
rising up in our imaginations with respect to those we love and who are
absent from us.

You ask me if I ever write any journal, or anything else now. The time
that I passed in the South was so crowded with daily and hourly
occupations that, though I kept a regular journal, it was hastily
written, and received constant additional notes of things that
occurred, and that I wished to remember, inserted in a very irregular
fashion in it.... I think I should like to carry this journal down to
Georgia with me this winter; to revise, correct, and add whatever my
second experience might furnish to the chronicle. It has been suggested
to me that such an account of a Southern plantation might be worth
publishing; but I think such a publication would be a breach of
confidence, an advantage taken on my part of the situation of trust,
which I held on the estate. As my condemnation of the whole system is
unequivocal, and all my illustrations of its evils must be drawn from
our own plantation, I do not think I have a right to exhibit the
interior management and economy of that property to the world at large,
as a sample of Southern slavery, especially as I did not go thither with
any such purpose. This winter I think I shall mention my desire upon the
subject