Dearest E——.  I think it right to begin this letter with an account of a most prosperous fishing expedition Jack and I achieved the other morning.  It is true we still occasionally drew up huge cat-fish, with their detestable beards and spikes, but we also captivated some magnificent perch, and the Altamaha perch are worth one’s while both to catch and to eat.  On a visit I had to make on the mainland, the same day, I saw a tiny strip of garden ground, rescued from the sandy road, called the street, perfectly filled with hyacinths, double jonquils, and snowdrops, a charming nosegay for February 11.  After leaving the boat on my return home, I encountered a curious creature walking all sideways, a small cross between a lobster and a crab.  One of the negroes to whom I applied for its denomination informed me that it was a land crab, with which general description of this very peculiar multipede you must be satisfied, for I can tell you no more.  I went a little further, as the nursery rhyme says, and met with a snake, and not being able to determine, at ignorant first sight, whether it was a malignant serpent or not, I ingloriously took to my heels, and came home on the full run.  It is the first of these exceedingly displeasing animals I have encountered here; but Jack, for my consolation, tells me that they abound on St. Simon’s, whither we are going—­’rattlesnakes, and all kinds,’ says he, with an affluence of promise in his tone that is quite agreeable.  Rattlesnakes will be quite enough of a treat, without the vague horrors that may be comprised in the additional ‘all kinds.’  Jack’s account of the game on St. Simon’s is really quite tantalising to me, who cannot carry a gun any more than if I were a slave.  He says that partridges, woodcocks, snipe, and wild duck abound, so that, at any rate, our table ought to be well supplied.  His account of the bears that are still to be found in the woods of the mainland, is not so pleasant, though he says they do no harm to the people, if they are not meddled with, but that they steal the corn from the fields when it is ripe, and actually swim the river to commit their depredations on the islands.  It seems difficult to believe this, looking at this wide and heavy stream—­though, to be sure, I did once see a young horse swim across the St. Lawrence, between Montreal and Quebec; a feat of natation which much enlarged my belief in what quadrupeds may accomplish when they have no choice between swimming and sinking.

You cannot imagine how great a triumph the virtue next to godliness is making under my auspices and a judicious system of small bribery.  I can hardly stir now without being assailed with cries of ’Missis, missis me mind chile, me bery clean,’ or the additional gratifying fact, ’and chile too, him bery clean.’  This virtue, however, if painful to the practisers, as no doubt it is, is expensive, too, to me, and I shall have to try some moral influence equivalent in value to a cent current coin of the realm.  What a poor chance, indeed, the poor abstract idea runs! however, it is really a comfort to see the poor little woolly heads, now in most instances stripped of their additional filthy artificial envelopes.