int' soon, and that they had better come then some time when I was with
him, and say what they had just been saying to me: and with this, and
various small bounties, I was forced, with a heavy heart, to dismiss them,
and when they were gone, with many exclamations of, 'Oh yes, missis, you
will, you will speak to massa for we; God bless you, missis, we sure you
will!' I had my cry out for them, for myself, for us. All these women had
had large families, and _all_ of them had lost half their children, and
several of them had lost more. How I do ponder upon the strange fate which
has brought me here, from so far away, from surroundings so curiously
different--how my own people in that blessed England of my birth would
marvel if they could suddenly have a vision of me as I sit here, and how
sorry some of them would be for me!

I am helped to bear all that is so very painful to me here by my constant
enjoyment of the strange wild scenery in the midst of which I live, and
which my resumption of my equestrian habits gives me almost daily
opportunity of observing. I rode to-day to some new cleared and ploughed
ground that was being prepared for the precious cotton crop. I crossed a
salt marsh upon a raised causeway that was perfectly alive with
land-crabs, whose desperately active endeavours to avoid my horse's hoofs
were so ludicrous that I literally laughed alone and aloud at them. The
sides of this road across the swamp were covered with a thick and close
embroidery of creeping moss or rather lichens of the most vivid green and
red: the latter made my horse's path look as if it was edged with an
exquisite pattern of coral; it was like a thing in a fairy tale, and
delighted me extremely.

I suppose, E----, one secret of my being able to suffer as acutely as I do
without being made either ill or absolutely miserable, is the childish
excitability of my temperament, and the sort of ecstacy which any
beautiful thing gives me. No day, almost no hour, passes without some
enjoyment of the sort this coral-bordered road gave me, which not only
charms my senses completely at the time, but returns again and again
before my memory, delighting my fancy, and stimulating my imagination. I
sometimes despise myself for what seems to me an inconceivable rapidity of
emotion, that almost makes me doubt whether anyone who feels so many
things can really be said to feel anything; but I generally recover from
this perplexity, by remembering whither