I find any number of all but superannuated men and women here, whose tales of the former grandeur of the estate and family are like things one reads of in novels.  One old woman who crawled to see me, and could hardly lift her poor bowed head high enough to look in my face, had been in Major ——­’s establishment in Philadelphia, and told with infinite pride of having waited upon his daughters and grand-daughters, Mr. ——­’s sisters.  Yet here she is, flung by like an old rag, crippled with age and disease, living, or rather dying by slow degrees in a miserable hovel, such as no decent household servant would at the North, I suppose, ever set their foot in.  The poor old creature complained bitterly to me of all her ailments and all her wants.  I can do little, alas! for either.  I had a visit from another tottering old crone called Dorcas, who all but went on her knees as she wrung and kissed my hands; with her came my friend Molly, the grandmother of the poor runaway girl, Louisa, whose story I wrote you some little time ago.  I had to hear it all over again, it being the newest event evidently in Molly’s life; and it ended as before with the highly reasonable proposition:  ’Me say, missis, what for massa’s niggar run away?  Snake eat em up, or dey starve to def in a swamp.  Massa’s niggars dey don’t nebbar run away.’  If I was ‘massa’s niggars,’ I ‘spose’ I shouldn’t run away either, with only those alternatives, but when I look at these wretches and at the sea that rolls round this island, and think how near the English West Indies and freedom are, it gives me a pretty severe twinge at the heart.

* * * * *

Dearest E——.  I am afraid my letters must be becoming very wearisome to you, for if, as the copy-book runs, ‘variety is charming,’ they certainly cannot be so, unless monotony is also charming, a thing not impossible to some minds, but of which the copy-book makes no mention.  But what will you? as the French say; my days are no more different from one another than peas in a dish, or sands on the shore:  ’tis a pleasant enough life to live, for one who, like myself, has a passion for dulness, but it affords small matter for epistolary correspondence.  I suppose it is the surfeit of excitement that I had in my youth that has made a life of quiet monotony so extremely agreeable to me; it is like stillness after loud noise, twilight after glare, rest after labour.  There is enough strangeness too in everything that surrounds me here to interest and excite me agreeably and sufficiently, and I should like the wild savage loneliness of the far away existence extremely, if it were not for the one small item of ’the slavery.’