of walking in
the sandy soil through which we were ploughing. I was not sorry when we
entered the house and left our bodyguard outside. In the evening I looked
over the plan of the delightful residence I had visited in the morning,
and could not help suggesting to Mr. ---- the advantage to be gained in
point of picturesqueness by merely turning the house round. It is but a
wooden frame one after all, and your folks 'down east' would think no more
of inviting it to face about than if it was built of cards; but the fact
is, here nothing signifies except the cotton crop, and whether one's nose
is in a swamp and one's eyes in a sand-heap, is of no consequence whatever
either to oneself (if oneself was not I) or anyone else.

I find here an immense proportion of old people; the work and the climate
of the rice plantation require the strongest of the able-bodied men and
women of the estate. The cotton crop is no longer by any means as
paramount in value as it used to be, and the climate, soil, and labour of
St. Simon's are better adapted to old, young, and feeble cultivators,
than the swamp fields of the rice-island. I wonder if I ever told you of
the enormous decrease in value of this same famous sea-island long staple
cotton. When Major ----, Mr. ----'s grandfather, first sent the produce
of this plantation where we now are to England, it was of so fine a
quality that it used to be quoted by itself in the Liverpool cotton
market, and was then worth half a guinea a pound; it is now not worth a
shilling a pound. This was told me by the gentleman in Liverpool who has
been factor for this estate for thirty years. Such a decrease as this in
the value of one's crop and the steady increase at the same time of a
slave population, now numbering between 700 and 800 bodies to clothe and
house,--mouths to feed, while the land is being exhausted by the careless
and wasteful nature of the agriculture itself, suggests a pretty serious
prospect of declining prosperity; and, indeed, unless these Georgia
cotton planters can command more land or lay abundant capital (which they
have not, being almost all of them over head and ears in debt) upon that
which has already spent its virgin vigour, it is a very obvious thing
that they must all very soon be eaten up by their own property. The rice
plantations are a great thing to fall back upon under these
circumstances, and the rice crop is now quite as valuable, if not more
so, than the cotton one o