o old or too infirm to be compelled to work, and
the half-starved and more than half-naked children apparently left here
under their charge, were the only inmates I found in these wretched
hovels.

I came home without stopping to look at anything, for I had no heart any
longer for what had so charmed me on my way to this place. Galloping along
the road after leaving the marshes, I scared an ox who was feeding
leisurely, and to my great dismay saw the foolish beast betake himself
with lumbering speed into the 'bush:' the slaves will have to hunt after
him, and perhaps will discover more rattlesnakes six or twelve feet long.

After reaching home I went to the house of the overseer to see his wife, a
tidy, decent, kind-hearted, little woman, who seems to me to do her duty
by the poor people she lives among, as well as her limited intelligence
and still more limited freedom allow. The house her husband lives in is
the former residence of Major ----, which was the great mansion of the
estate. It is now in a most ruinous and tottering condition, and they
inhabit but a few rooms in it; the others are gradually mouldering to
pieces, and the whole edifice will, I should think, hardly stand long
enough to be carried away by the river, which in its yearly inroads on the
bank on which it stands has already approached within a perilous proximity
to the old dilapidated planter's palace. Old Molly, of whom I have often
before spoken to you, who lived here in the days of the prosperity and
grandeur of 'Hampton,' still clings to the relics of her old master's
former magnificence and with a pride worthy of old Caleb of Ravenswood
showed me through the dismantled decaying rooms and over the remains of
the dairy, displaying a capacious fish-box or well, where, in the good old
days, the master's supply was kept in fresh salt water till required for
table. Her prideful lamentations over the departure of all this quondam
glory were ludicrous and pathetic; but while listening with some amusement
to the jumble of grotesque descriptions through which her impression of
the immeasurable grandeur and nobility of the house she served was the
predominant feature, I could not help contrasting the present state of the
estate with that which she described, and wondering why it should have
become, as it undoubtedly must have done, so infinitely less productive a
property than in the old Major's time.

Before closing this letter, I have a mind to transcr