I wrote you of my having been to a part of the estate called St. Clair’s, where there was formerly another residence of Major ——­’s; nothing remains now of it but a ruined chimney of some of the offices, which is standing yet in the middle of what has become a perfect wilderness.  At the best of times, with a large house, numerous household, and paths, and drives of approach, and the usual external conditions of civilisation about it, a residence here would have been the loneliest that can well be imagined; now it is the shaggiest desert of beautiful wood that I ever saw.  The magnificent old oaks stand round the place in silent solemn grandeur; and among them I had no difficulty in recognising, by the description Captain F——­ had given me of it, the crumbling shattered relic of a tree called Oglethorpe’s oak.  That worthy valiant old governor had a residence here himself in the early days of the colony; when, under the influence of Wesley, he vainly made such strenuous efforts to keep aloof from his infant province the sore curse of slavery.

I rode almost the whole way through a grove of perfect evergreen.  I had with me one of the men of the name of Hector, who has a good deal to do with the horses, and so had volunteered to accompany me, being one of the few negroes on the estate who can sit a horse.  In the course of our conversation, Hector divulged certain opinions relative to the comparative gentility of driving in a carriage, and the vulgarity of walking; which sent me into fits of laughing; at which he grinned sympathetically, and opened his eyes very wide, but certainly without attaining the least insight into what must have appeared to him my very unaccountable and unreasonable merriment.  Among various details of the condition of the people on the several estates in the island, he told me that a great number of the men on all the different plantations had wives on the neighbouring estates, as well as on that to which they properly belonged.  ‘Oh, but,’ said I, ’Hector, you know that cannot be, a man has but one lawful wife.’  Hector knew this, he said, and yet seemed puzzled himself, and rather puzzled me to account for the fact, that this extensive practice of bigamy was perfectly well known to the masters and overseers, and never in any way found fault with, or interfered with.  Perhaps this promiscuous mode of keeping up the slave population finds favour with the owners of creatures who are valued in the market at so much per head.  This was a solution which occurred to me, but which I left my Trojan hero to discover, by dint of the profound pondering into which he fell.