qualities of our best South Down.  The mutton we have here grazes on the short sweet grass at St. Simon’s within sea-salt influence, and is some of the very best I have ever tasted, but it is invariably brought to table in lumps or chunks of no particular shape or size, and in which it is utterly impossible to recognise any part of the quadruped creature sheep with which my eyes have hitherto become acquainted.  Eat it, one may and does thankfully; name it, one could not by any possibility.  Having submitted to this for some time, I at length enquired why a decent usual Christian joint of mutton—­leg, shoulder, or saddle—­was never brought to table:  the reply was that the carpenter always cut up the meat, and that he did not know how to do it otherwise than by dividing it into so many thick square pieces, and proceeding to chop it up on that principle; and the consequence of this is that four lumps or chunks are all that a whole sheep ever furnishes to our table by this artistic and economical process.

This morning I have been to the hospital to see a poor woman who has just enriched Mr. ——­ by borning him another slave.  The poor little piccaninny, as they called it, was not one bit uglier than white babies under similarly novel circumstances, except in one particular, that it had a head of hair like a trunk, in spite of which I had all the pains in the world in persuading its mother not to put a cap upon it.  I bribed her finally, by the promise of a pair of socks instead, with which I undertook to endow her child, and, moreover, actually prevailed upon her to forego the usual swaddling and swathing process, and let her poor baby be dressed at its first entrance into life as I assured her both mine had been.

On leaving the hospital I visited the huts all along the street, confiscating sundry refractory baby caps among shrieks and outcries, partly of laughter and partly of real ignorant alarm for the consequence.  I think if this infatuation for hot head-dresses continues, I shall make shaving the children’s heads the only condition upon which they shall be allowed to wear caps.

On Sunday morning I went over to Darien to church.  Our people’s church was closed, the minister having gone to officiate elsewhere.  With laudable liberality I walked into the opposite church of a different, not to say opposite sect:  here I heard a sermon, the opening of which will, probably, edify you as it did me, viz., that if a man was just in all his dealings he was apt to think he did all that could be required of him,—­and no wide mistake either one might suppose.  But is it not wonderful how such words can be spoken here, with the most absolute unconsciousness of their tremendous bearing upon the existence of every slaveholder who hears them?  Certainly the use that is second nature has made the awful injustice in the daily practice of which these people live, a thing of which they are as little aware as you or I of the atmospheric