As an accompaniment to ‘de beautifullest mutton de missis ever see,’ we have just received from my neighbour Mr. C——­ the most magnificent supply of fresh vegetables, green peas, salad, &c.  He has a garden and a Scotchman’s real love for horticulture, and I profit by them in this very agreeable manner.

I have been interrupted by several visits, my dear E——­, among other, one from a poor creature called Judy, whose sad story and condition affected me most painfully.  She had been married, she said, some years ago to one of the men called Temba, who however now has another wife, having left her because she went mad.  While out of her mind she escaped into the jungle, and contrived to secrete herself there for some time, but was finally tracked and caught, and brought back and punished by being made to sit, day after day, for hours in the stocks—­a severe punishment for a man, but for a woman perfectly barbarous.  She complained of chronic rheumatism, and other terrible ailments, and said she suffered such intolerable pain while labouring in the fields, that she had come to entreat me to have her work lightened.  She could hardly crawl, and cried bitterly all the time she spoke to me.

She told me a miserable story of her former experience on the plantation under Mr. K——­’s overseership.  It seems that Jem Valiant (an extremely difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valour is sufficiently accounted for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) was her firstborn, the son of Mr. K——­, who forced her, flogged her severely for having resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five Pound—­a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently atoned for by the lash.  The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympathy, makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor creature said, that bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal swamp of Five Pound.

I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell them to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain unvarnished manner in which they are told to me.  I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple horror and misery of their bare details.

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My dearest E——.  I have had an uninterrupted stream of women and children flowing in the whole morning to say, ‘Ha de missis!’ Among others, a poor woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages, nine of her children had died; for the last three years she had become almost a cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven