The women who visited me yesterday evening were all in the family-way, and came to entreat of me to have the sentence (what else can I call it?) modified, which condemns them to resume their labour of hoeing in the fields three weeks after their confinement.  They knew, of course, that I cannot interfere with their appointed labour, and therefore their sole entreaty was that I would use my influence with Mr. ——­ to obtain for them a month’s respite from labour in the field after child-bearing.  Their principal spokeswoman, a woman with a bright sweet face, called Mary, and a very sweet voice, which is by no means an uncommon excellence among them, appealed to my own experience; and while she spoke of my babies, and my carefully tended, delicately nursed, and tenderly watched confinement and convalescence, and implored me to have a kind of labour given to them less exhausting during the month after their confinement, I held the table before me so hard in order not to cry that I think my fingers ought to have left a mark on it.  At length I told them that Mr. ——­ had forbidden me to bring him any more complaints from them, for that he thought the ease with which I received and believed their stories only tended to make them discontented, and that, therefore, I feared I could not promise to take their petitions to him; but that he would be coming down to ’the point’ soon, and that they had better come then some time when I was with him, and say what they had just been saying to me:  and with this, and various small bounties, I was forced, with a heavy heart, to dismiss them, and when they were gone, with many exclamations of, ’Oh yes, missis, you will, you will speak to massa for we; God bless you, missis, we sure you will!’ I had my cry out for them, for myself, for us.  All these women had had large families, and all of them had lost half their children, and several of them had lost more.  How I do ponder upon the strange fate which has brought me here, from so far away, from surroundings so curiously different—­how my own people in that blessed England of my birth would marvel if they could suddenly have a vision of me as I sit here, and how sorry some of them would be for me!

I am helped to bear all that is so very painful to me here by my constant enjoyment of the strange wild scenery in the midst of which I live, and which my resumption of my equestrian habits gives me almost daily opportunity of observing.  I rode to-day to some new cleared and ploughed ground that was being prepared for the precious cotton crop.  I crossed a salt marsh upon a raised causeway that was perfectly alive with land-crabs, whose desperately active endeavours to avoid my horse’s hoofs were so ludicrous that I literally laughed alone and aloud at them.  The sides of this road across the swamp were covered with a thick and close embroidery of creeping moss or rather lichens of the most vivid green and red:  the latter made my horse’s path look as if it was edged with an exquisite pattern of coral; it was like a thing in a fairy tale, and delighted me extremely.