work; and Bran having told her that he’d tie her up and flog her if she did not get it done, she had left the field and run into the swamp.  ‘Tie you up, Louisa!’ said I, ‘what is that?’ She then described to me that they were fastened up by their wrists to a beam or a branch of a tree, their feet barely touching the ground, so as to allow them no purchase for resistance or evasion of the lash, their clothes turned over their heads, and their backs scored with a leather thong, either by the driver himself, or if he pleases to inflict their punishment by deputy, any of the men he may choose to summon to the office; it might be father, brother, husband, or lover, if the overseer so ordered it.  I turned sick, and my blood curdled listening to these details from the slender young slip of a lassie, with her poor piteous face and murmuring pleading voice.  ‘Oh,’ said I, ’Louisa; but the rattlesnakes, the dreadful rattlesnakes in the swamps; were you not afraid of those horrible creatures?’ ‘Oh, missis,’ said the poor child, ’me no tink of dem, me forget all ‘bout dem for de fretting.’  ’Why did you come home at last?’ ’Oh, missis, me starve with hunger, me most dead with hunger before me come back.’  ‘And were you flogged, Louisa?’ said I, with a shudder at what the answer might be.  ’No, missis, me go to hospital; me almost dead and sick so long, ’spec Driver Bran him forgot ‘bout de flogging.’  I am getting perfectly savage over all these doings, E——­, and really think I should consider my own throat and those of my children well cut, if some night the people were to take it into their heads to clear off scores in that fashion.

The Calibanish wonderment of all my visitors at the exceedingly coarse and simple furniture and rustic means of comfort of my abode is very droll.  I have never inhabited any apartment so perfectly devoid of what we should consider the common decencies of life; but to them my rude chintz-covered sofa and common pine-wood table, with its green baize cloth, seem the adornings of a palace; and often in the evening, when my bairns are asleep, and M——­ up-stairs keeping watch over them, and I sit writing this daily history for your edification,—­the door of the great barn-like room is opened stealthily, and one after another, men and women come trooping silently in, their naked feet falling all but inaudibly on the bare boards as they betake themselves to the hearth, where they squat down on their hams in a circle,—­the bright blaze from the huge pine logs, which is the only light of this half of the room, shining on their sooty limbs and faces, and making them look like a ring of ebony idols surrounding my domestic hearth.  I have had as many as fourteen at a time squatting silently there for nearly half an hour, watching me writing at the other end of the room.  The candles on my table give only light enough for my own occupation, the fire light illuminates the rest of the apartment; and you cannot imagine anything stranger than the effect