I rode out to-day upon Miss Kate again, with Jack for my esquire.  I made various vain attempts to ride through the woods, following the cattle tracks; they turned round and round into each other, or led out into the sandy pine barren, the eternal frame in which all nature is set here, the inevitable limit to the prospect, turn landward which way you will.  The wood paths which I followed between evergreen thickets, though little satisfactory in their ultimate result, were really more beautiful than the most perfect arrangement of artificial planting that I ever saw in an English park; and I thought if I could transplant the region which I was riding through bodily into the midst of some great nobleman’s possessions on the other side of the water, how beautiful an accession it would be thought to them.  I was particularly struck with the elegant growth of a profuse wild shrub I passed several times to-day, the leaves of which were pale green underneath, and a deep red, varnished brown above.

I must give you an idea of the sort of service one is liable to obtain from one’s most intelligent and civilised servants hereabouts, and the consequent comfort and luxury of one’s daily existence.  Yesterday, Aleck, the youth who fulfils the duties of what you call a waiter, and we in England a footman, gave me a salad for dinner, mixed with so large a portion of the soil in which it had grown, that I requested him to-day to be kind enough to wash the lettuce before he brought it to table.  M——­ later in the day told me that he had applied to her very urgently for soap and a brush ‘as missis wished de lettuce scrubbed,’ a fate from which my second salad was saved by her refusal of these desired articles, and further instructions upon the subject.

* * * * *

Dearest E——.  I have been long promising poor old House Molly to visit her in her own cabin, and so the day before yesterday I walked round the settlement to her dwelling; and a most wretched hovel I found it.  She has often told me of the special directions left by her old master for the comfort and well-being of her old age; and certainly his charge has been but little heeded by his heirs, for the poor faithful old slave is most miserably off in her infirm years.  She made no complaint, however, but seemed overjoyed at my coming to see her.  She took me to the hut of her brother, Old Jacob, where the same wretched absence of every decency and every comfort prevailed; but neither of them seemed to think the condition that appeared so wretched to me one of peculiar hardship—­though Molly’s former residence in her master’s house might reasonably have made her discontented with the lot of absolute privation to which she was now turned over—­but, for the moment, my visit seemed to compensate for all sublunary sorrows, and she and poor old Jacob kept up a duet of rejoicing at my advent, and that I had brought ’de little missis among um people afore they die.’