about who was like who, but came to certain conclusions in my own mind as to a young lad who had been among our morning visitors, and whose extremely light colour and straight handsome features and striking resemblance to Mr. K——­, had suggested suspicions of a rather unpleasant nature to me, and whose sole-acknowledged parent was a very black negress of the name of Minda.  I have no doubt at all, now, that he is another son of Mr. K——­, Mr. ——­’s paragon overseer.

As we drew near the house again we were gradually joined by such a numerous escort of Mr. ——­’s slaves that it was almost with difficulty we could walk along the path.  They buzzed, and hummed, and swarmed round us like flies, and the heat and dust consequent upon this friendly companionship were a most unpleasant addition to the labour of walking in the sandy soil through which we were ploughing.  I was not sorry when we entered the house and left our bodyguard outside.  In the evening I looked over the plan of the delightful residence I had visited in the morning, and could not help suggesting to Mr. ——­ the advantage to be gained in point of picturesqueness by merely turning the house round.  It is but a wooden frame one after all, and your folks ‘down east’ would think no more of inviting it to face about than if it was built of cards; but the fact is, here nothing signifies except the cotton crop, and whether one’s nose is in a swamp and one’s eyes in a sand-heap, is of no consequence whatever either to oneself (if oneself was not I) or anyone else.

I find here an immense proportion of old people; the work and the climate of the rice plantation require the strongest of the able-bodied men and women of the estate.  The cotton crop is no longer by any means as paramount in value as it used to be, and the climate, soil, and labour of St. Simon’s are better adapted to old, young, and feeble cultivators, than the swamp fields of the rice-island.  I wonder if I ever told you of the enormous decrease in value of this same famous sea-island long staple cotton.  When Major ——­, Mr. ——­’s grandfather, first sent the produce of this plantation where we now are to England, it was of so fine a quality that it used to be quoted by itself in the Liverpool cotton market, and was then worth half a guinea a pound; it is now not worth a shilling a pound.  This was told me by the gentleman in Liverpool who has been factor for this estate for thirty years.  Such a decrease as this in the value of one’s crop and the steady increase at the same time of a slave population, now numbering between 700 and 800 bodies to clothe and house,—­mouths to feed, while the land is being exhausted by the careless and wasteful nature of the agriculture itself, suggests a pretty serious prospect of declining prosperity; and, indeed, unless these Georgia cotton planters can command more land or lay abundant capital (which they have not, being almost all of them over head and ears in debt) upon that which has already spent its virgin vigour, it is a very obvious thing that they must all very soon be eaten up by their own property.  The rice plantations are a great thing to fall back upon under these circumstances, and the rice crop is now quite as valuable, if not more so, than the cotton one on Mr. ——­’s estates, once so famous and prosperous through the latter.