In remonstrating with him upon the want of decent cleanliness generally among the people, and citing to him one among the many evils resulting from it, the intolerable quantity of fleas in all the houses, he met me full with another fact in natural history which, if it be fact and not fiction, certainly gave him the best of the argument:  he declared, with the utmost vehemence, that the sand of the pine woods on the mainland across the river literally swarmed with fleas—­that in the uninhabited places the sand itself was full of them, and that so far from being a result of human habitation, they were found in less numbers round the negro huts on the mainland than in the lonely woods around them.

The ploughing is at length fairly inaugurated, and there is a regular jubilee among the negroes thereat.  After discoursing fluently on the improvements likely to result from the measure, Jack wound up by saying he had been afraid it would not be tried on account of the greater scarcity, and consequently greater value, of horses over men in these parts—­a modest and slave-like conclusion.

* * * * *

Dearest E——.  I walked up to-day, February 14th, to see that land of promise the ploughed field:  it did not look to me anything like as heavy soil as the cold wet sour stiff clay I have seen turned up in some of the swampy fields round Lenox; and as for the cypress roots which were urged as so serious an impediment, they are not much more frequent, and certainly not as resisting, as the granite knees and elbows that stick out through the scanty covering of the said clay, which mother earth allows herself as sole garment for her old bones in many a Berkshire patch of corn.  After my survey, as I walked home, I came upon a gang of lusty women, as the phrase is here for women in the family-way; they were engaged in burning stubble, and I was nearly choked while receiving the multitudinous complaints and compliments with which they overwhelmed me.  After leaving them, I wandered along the river side on the dyke homeward, rejoicing in the buds and green things putting forth their tender shoots on every spray, in the early bees and even the less amiable wasps busy in the sunshine with flowers—­(weeds I suppose they should be called), already opening their sweet temptations to them, and giving the earth a spring aspect, such as it does not wear with you in Massachusetts till late in May.

In the afternoon I took my accustomed row:  there had been a tremendous ebb tide, the consequence of which was to lay bare portions of the banks which I had not seen before.  The cypress roots form a most extraordinary mass of intertwined wood-work, so closely matted and joined together, that the separate roots, in spite of their individual peculiarities, appeared only like divisions of a continuous body; they presented the appearance in several places of jagged pieces of splintered rock, with their huge teeth