or creatures
whose cases I sent you in my last letter, she told me that within the
memory of many of the slaves now living on the plantation, a grove of
orange trees had spread its fragrance and beauty between the house and the
river. Not a vestige remains of them. The earth that bore them was
gradually undermined, slipped, and sank down into the devouring flood, and
when she saw the astonished incredulity of my look she led me to the
ragged and broken bank, and there, immediately below it and just covered
by the turbid waters of the in-rushing tide, were the heads of the poor
drowned orange trees, swaying like black twigs in the briny flood which
had not yet dislodged all of them from their hold upon the soil which had
gone down beneath the water wearing its garland of bridal blossom. As I
looked at those trees a wild wish rose in my heart that the river and the
sea would swallow up and melt in their salt waves the whole of this
accursed property of ours. I am afraid the horror of slavery with which I
came down to the south, the general theoretic abhorrence of an
Englishwoman for it, has gained, through the intensity it has acquired, a
morbid character of mere desire to be delivered from my own share in it. I
think so much of these wretches that I see, that I can hardly remember any
others, and my zeal for the general emancipation of the slave, has almost
narrowed itself to this most painful desire that I and mine were freed
from the responsibility of our share in this huge misery,--and so I
thought:--'Beat, beat, the crumbling banks and sliding shores, wild waves
of the Atlantic and the Altamaha! Sweep down and carry hence this evil
earth and these homes of tyranny, and roll above the soil of slavery, and
wash my soul and the souls of those I love clean from the blood of our
kind!' But I have no idea that Mr. ---- and his brother would cry amen to
any such prayer. Sometimes, as I stand and listen to the roll of the great
ocean surges on the further side of little St. Simon's Island, a small
green screen of tangled wilderness that interposes between this point and
the Atlantic, I think how near our West Indian islands and freedom are to
these unfortunate people, many of whom are expert and hardy boatmen, as
far as the mere mechanical management of a boat goes; but unless
Providence were compass and steersman too it avails nothing that they
should know how near their freedom might be found, nor have I any right to
tell th