n Mr. ----'s estates, once so famous and
prosperous through the latter.

I find any number of all but superannuated men and women here, whose
tales of the former grandeur of the estate and family are like things one
reads of in novels. One old woman who crawled to see me, and could hardly
lift her poor bowed head high enough to look in my face, had been in
Major ----'s establishment in Philadelphia, and told with infinite pride
of having waited upon his daughters and grand-daughters, Mr. ----'s
sisters. Yet here she is, flung by like an old rag, crippled with age and
disease, living, or rather dying by slow degrees in a miserable hovel,
such as no decent household servant would at the North, I suppose, ever
set their foot in. The poor old creature complained bitterly to me of all
her ailments and all her wants. I can do little, alas! for either. I had
a visit from another tottering old crone called Dorcas, who all but went
on her knees as she wrung and kissed my hands; with her came my friend
Molly, the grandmother of the poor runaway girl, Louisa, whose story I
wrote you some little time ago. I had to hear it all over again, it being
the newest event evidently in Molly's life; and it ended as before with
the highly reasonable proposition: 'Me say, missis, what for massa's
niggar run away? Snake eat em up, or dey starve to def in a swamp.
Massa's niggars dey don't nebbar run away.' If I was 'massa's niggars,' I
'spose' I shouldn't run away either, with only those alternatives, but
when I look at these wretches and at the sea that rolls round this
island, and think how near the English West Indies and freedom are, it
gives me a pretty severe twinge at the heart.

* * * * *

Dearest E----. I am afraid my letters must be becoming very wearisome to
you, for if, as the copy-book runs, 'variety is charming,' they certainly
cannot be so, unless monotony is also charming, a thing not impossible to
some minds, but of which the copy-book makes no mention. But what will
you? as the French say; my days are no more different from one another
than peas in a dish, or sands on the shore: 'tis a pleasant enough life to
live, for one who, like myself, has a passion for dulness, but it affords
small matter for epistolary correspondence. I suppose it is the surfeit of
excitement that I had in my youth that has made a life of quiet monotony
so extremely agreeable to me; it is like stillness after loud noise