e raise this year will cost nearly if not
quite as much as we shall get for it. I advanced a dollar a pound on
the negroes' cotton, you know, and it has cost me about twenty-five
cents a pound more to gin it, etc., etc., while I am offered less than
a dollar. Query: how much commission shall I get for doing the
business?

T. E. R. TO C. P. W.

_St. Helena, May 6._ The Coffin's Pointites had a gay old blow-out
over at church, owing to Mr. Williams' telling them that they must pay
Mr. Philbrick for pasturing their horses. They called Mr. P. a thief,
robber, liar, and everything else that was bad.

The death of Lincoln was an awful blow to the negroes here. One would
say, "Uncle Sam is dead, isn't he?" Another, "The Government is dead,
isn't it? You have got to go North and Secesh come back, haven't you?
We going to be slaves again?" They could not comprehend the matter at
all--how Lincoln could die and the Government still live. It made them
very quiet for a few days.

Secesh are coming back quite freely nowadays and looking about as much
as they please: Old Ben and young Ben Chaplin, several of the
Pritchards, and Captain Williams, that owned a plantation on Ladies
Island.

The negroes begin to clamor about the final payment for their cotton,
and we have to tell them that the probabilities are that there will
not be any more. Then they think we have cheated them, and so the
world goes in South Carolina. Rather a thankless task.

F. H. TO C. P. W.

_Coffin's, May 21._ The honesty of this people and their disinterested
benevolence are as apparent as ever. Please don't exaggerate these
valuable qualities, either in the papers, to the Educational
Commission, or in your private conversation; because it is better that
those who are interested in the welfare of these people should not be
deceived into the notion that they are so nearly perfect as to need no
further expenditure of benevolent effort. Of course, we know the great
danger of your wreathing your account of them in roses and laurel.
One's enthusiasm is so excited in their behalf by a few years'
residence here, that his veracity is in great danger of being swamped
in his ideality, and his judgment lost in his admiration. So pardon my
warning to you.

The McTureous lands have recently been sold, and about every family
upon this place has got its five or ten acres. I tell them they had
better move or build houses upon their lots and be independent of "we,