logged. After this she contrived
to escape again, and lived for some time skulking in the woods, and she
supposes mad, for when she was taken again she was entirely naked. She
subsequently recovered from this derangement, and seems now just like all
the other poor creatures who come to me for help and pity. I suppose her
constant child-bearing and hard labour in the fields at the same time may
have produced the temporary insanity.

_Sukey_, Bush's wife, only came to pay her respects. She had had four
miscarriages, had brought eleven children into the world, five of whom are
dead.

_Molly_, Quambo's wife, also only came to see me; hers was the best
account I have yet received; she had had nine children, and six of them
were still alive.

This is only the entry for to-day, in my diary, of the people's complaints
and visits. Can you conceive a more wretched picture than that which it
exhibits of the conditions under which these women live? Their cases are
in no respect singular, and though they come with pitiful entreaties that
I will help them with some alleviation of their pressing physical
distresses, it seems to me marvellous with what desperate patience (I
write it advisedly, patience of utter despair) they endure their
sorrow-laden existence. Even the poor wretch who told that miserable story
of insanity and lonely hiding in the swamps and scourging when she was
found, and of her renewed madness and flight, did so in a sort of low,
plaintive, monotonous murmur of misery, as if such sufferings were all 'in
the day's work.'

I ask these questions about their children because I think the number they
bear as compared with the number they rear a fair gauge of the effect of
the system on their own health and that of their offspring. There was
hardly one of these women, as you will see by the details I have noted of
their ailments, who might not have been a candidate for a bed in an
hospital, and they had come to me after working all day in the fields.

* * * * *

Dearest E----. When I told you in my last letter of the encroachments
which the waters of the Altamaha are daily making on the bank at Hampton
Point and immediately in front of the imposing-looking old dwelling of the
former master, I had no idea how rapid this crumbling process has been of
late years; but to-day, standing there with Mrs. G----, whom I had gone to
consult about the assistance we might render to some of the po