manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced labour; the brutal inhumanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the mother of ten children; to exact from her toil which was to maintain in luxury two idle young men, the owners of the plantation.  I said I thought female labour of the sort exacted from these slaves, and corporal chastisement such as they endure, must be abhorrent to any manly or humane man.  Mr. ——­ said he thought it was disagreeable, and left me to my reflections with that concession.  My letter has been interrupted for the last three days; by nothing special, however.  My occupations and interests here of course know no change; but Mr. ——­ has been anxious for a little while past that we should go down to St. Simon’s, the cotton plantation.

We shall suffer less from the heat, which I am beginning to find oppressive on this swamp island; and he himself wished to visit that part of his property, whither he had not yet been since our arrival in Georgia.  So the day before yesterday he departed to make the necessary arrangements for our removal thither; and my time in the meanwhile has been taken up in fitting him out for his departure.

In the morning Jack and I took our usual paddle, and having the tackle on board, tried fishing.  I was absorbed in many sad and serious considerations, and wonderful to relate (for you know ——­ how keen an angler I am), had lost all consciousness of my occupation, until after I know not how long a time elapsing without the shadow of a nibble, I was recalled to a most ludicrous perception of my ill-success by Jack’s sudden observation, ‘Missis, fishing berry good fun when um fish bite.’  This settled the fishing for that morning, and I let Jack paddle me down the broad turbid stream, endeavouring to answer in the most comprehensible manner to his keen but utterly undeveloped intellects the innumerable questions with which he plied me about Philadelphia, about England, about the Atlantic, &c.  He dilated much upon the charms of St. Simon’s, to which he appeared very glad that we were going; and among other items of description mentioned, what I was very glad to hear, that it was a beautiful place for riding, and that I should be able to indulge to my heart’s content in my favourite exercise, from which I have, of course, been utterly debarred in this small dykeland of ours.  He insinuated more than once his hope and desire that he might be allowed to accompany me, but as I knew nothing at all about his capacity for equestrian exercises, or any of the arrangements that might or might not interfere with such a plan, I was discreetly silent, and took no notice of his most comically turned hints on the subject.  In our row we started a quantity of wild duck, and he told me that there was a great deal of game at St. Simon’s, but that the people did not contrive to catch much, though they laid traps constantly for it.  Of course their possessing firearms is quite out of the question; but this abundance of what must be to them such especially desirable prey, makes the fact a great hardship.  I almost wonder they don’t learn to shoot like savages with bows and arrows, but these would be weapons, and equally forbidden them.