t give her--rest from her labour and her pain--this mother of fifteen
children.

Another of my visitors had a still more dismal story to tell; her name was
Die; she had had sixteen children, fourteen of whom were dead; she had had
four miscarriages, one had been caused by falling down with a very heavy
burthen on her head, and one from having her arms strained up to be
lashed. I asked her what she meant by having her arms tied up; she said
their hands were first tied together, sometimes by the wrists, and
sometimes, which was worse, by the thumbs, and they were then drawn up to
a tree or post, so as almost to swing them off the ground, and then their
clothes rolled round their waist, and a man with a cow-hide stands and
stripes them. I give you the woman's words; she did not speak of this as
of anything strange, unusual or especially horrid and abominable; and when
I said, 'Did they do that to you when you were with child?' she simply
replied, 'Yes, missis.' And to all this I listen--I, an English woman, the
wife of the man who owns these wretches, and I cannot say, 'That thing
shall not be done again; that cruel shame and villany shall never be known
here again.' I gave the woman meat and flannel, which were what she came
to ask for, and remained choking with indignation and grief long after
they had all left me to my most bitter thoughts.

I went out to try and walk off some of the weight of horror and depression
which I am beginning to feel daily more and more, surrounded by all this
misery and degradation that I can neither help nor hinder. The blessed
spring is coming very fast, the air is full of delicious wild wood
fragrances, and the wonderful songs of southern birds; the wood paths are
as tempting as paths into Paradise, but Jack is in such deadly terror
about the snakes, which are now beginning to glide about with a freedom
and frequency certainly not pleasing, that he will not follow me off the
open road, and twice to-day scared me back from charming wood paths I
ventured to explore with his exclamations of terrified warning.

I gathered some exquisite pink blossoms, of a sort of waxen texture, off a
small shrub which was strange to me, and for which Jack's only name was
dye-bush; but I could not ascertain from him whether any dyeing substance
was found in its leaves, bark, or blossoms.

I returned home along the river side, stopping to admire a line of noble
live oaks beginning, alas! to be smothered with