be, to the owners of this plantation.  She was terribly crippled with rheumatism, and came to beg for some flannel.  She had had eleven children, five of whom had died, and two miscarriages.  As she took her departure the vacant space she left on the other side of my writing table was immediately filled by another black figure with a bowed back and piteous face, one of the thousand ‘Mollies’ on the estate, where the bewildering redundancy of their name is avoided by adding that of their husband; so when the question, ’Well, who are you?’ was answered with the usual genuflexion, and ‘I’se Molly, missis!’ I, of course, went on with ‘whose Molly?’ and she went on to refer herself to the ownership (under Mr. ——­ and heaven) of one Tony, but proceeded to say that he was not her real husband.  This appeal to an element of reality in the universally accepted fiction which passes here by the title of marriage surprised me; and on asking her what she meant, she replied that her real husband had been sold from the estate for repeated attempts to run away; he had made his escape several times, and skulked starving in the woods and morasses, but had always been tracked and brought back, and flogged almost to death, and finally sold as an incorrigible runaway.  What a spirit of indomitable energy the wretched man must have had to have tried so often that hideously hopeless attempt to fly!  I do not write you the poor woman’s jargon, which was ludicrous; for I cannot write you the sighs, and tears, and piteous looks, and gestures, that made it pathetic; of course she did not know whither or to whom her real husband had been sold; but in the meantime Mr. K——­, that merciful Providence of the estate, had provided her with the above-named Tony, by whom she had had nine children, six of whom were dead; she, too, had miscarried twice.  She came to ask me for some flannel for her legs, which are all swollen with constant rheumatism, and to beg me to give her something to cure some bad sores and ulcers, which seemed to me dreadful enough in their present condition, but which she said break out afresh and are twice as bad every summer.

I have let my letter lie since the day before yesterday, dear E——­, having had no leisure to finish it.  Yesterday morning I rode out to St. Clair’s, where there used formerly to be another negro settlement and another house of Major ——­’s.  I had been persuaded to try one of the mares I had formerly told you of, and to be sure a more ‘curst’ quadruped, and one more worthy of a Petruchio for a rider I did never back.  Her temper was furious, her gait intolerable, her mouth, the most obdurate that ever tugged against bit and bridle.  It is not wise anywhere—­here it is less wise than anywhere else in the world—­to say ’Jamais de cette eau je ne boirai;’ but I think I will never ride that delightful creature Miss Kate again.