eager breathlessness, ’Oh missis, missis! you no hear me cry, you no hear me call.  Oh missis! me call, me cry, and me run; make me a gown like dat.  Do, for massy’s sake, only make me a gown like dat.’  This modest request for a riding habit in which to hoe the cotton fields served for an introduction to sundry other petitions for rice and sugar and flannel, all which I promised the petitioner, but not the ‘gown like dat;’ whereupon I rode off, and she flung herself down in the middle of the road to get her wind and rest.

The passion for dress is curiously strong in these people, and seems as though it might be made an instrument in converting them, outwardly at any rate, to something like civilisation; for though their own native taste is decidedly both barbarous and ludicrous, it is astonishing how very soon they mitigate it in imitation of their white models.  The fine figures of the mulatto women in Charleston and Savannah are frequently as elegantly and tastefully dressed as those of any of their female superiors; and here on St. Simon’s, owing, I suppose, to the influence of the resident lady proprietors of the various plantations, and the propensity to imitation in their black dependents, the people that I see all seem to me much tidier, cleaner, and less fantastically dressed than those on the rice plantation, where no such influences reach them.

On my return from my ride I had a visit from Captain F——­, the manager of a neighbouring plantation, with whom I had a long conversation about the present and past condition of the estate, the species of feudal magnificence in which its original owner, Major ——­, lived, the iron rule of old overseer K——­ which succeeded to it, and the subsequent sovereignty of his son, Mr. R——­ K——­, the man for whom Mr. ——­ entertains such a cordial esteem, and of whom every account I receive from the negroes seems to me to indicate a merciless sternness of disposition that may be a virtue in a slave-driver, but is hardly a Christian grace.  Captain F——­ was one of our earliest visitors at the rice plantation on our arrival, and I think I told you of his mentioning, in speaking to me of the orange trees which formerly grew all round the dykes there, that he had taken Basil Hall there once in their blossoming season, and that he had said the sight was as well worth crossing the Atlantic for as Niagara.  To-day he referred to that again.  He has resided for a great many years on a plantation here, and is connected with our neighbour, old Mr. C——­, whose daughter, I believe, he married.  He interested me extremely by his description of the house Major ——­ had many years ago on a part of the island called St. Clair.  As far as I can understand there must have been an indefinite number of ‘masters’’ residences on this estate in the old Major’s time; for what with the one we are building, and the ruined remains of those not quite improved off the face of the earth, and the tradition of those that have ceased to exist, even as ruins, I make out no fewer than seven.  How gladly would I exchange all that remain and all that do not, for the smallest tenement in your blessed Yankee mountain village!