air that we inhale each time we breathe.  The bulk of the congregation in this church was white.  The negroes are, of course, not allowed to mix with their masters in the house of God, and there is no special place set apart for them.  Occasionally one or two are to be seen in the corners of the singing gallery, but any more open pollution by them of their owners’ church could not be tolerated.  Mr. ——­’s people have petitioned very vehemently that he would build a church for them on the island.  I doubt, however, his allowing them such a luxury as a place of worship all to themselves.  Such a privilege might not be well thought of by the neighbouring planters; indeed, it is almost what one might call a whity-brown idea, dangerous, demoralising, inflammatory, incendiary.  I should not wonder if I should be suspected of being the chief corner-stone of it, and yet I am not:  it is an old hope and entreaty of these poor people, which am afraid they are not destined to see fulfilled.

* * * * *

Dearest E——.  Passing the rice-mill this morning in my walk, I went in to look at the machinery, the large steam mortars which shell the rice, and which work under the intelligent and reliable supervision of Engineer Ned.  I was much surprised, in the course of conversation with him this morning, to find how much older a man he was than he appeared.  Indeed his youthful appearance had hitherto puzzled me much in accounting for his very superior intelligence and the important duties confided to him.  He is, however, a man upwards of forty years old, although he looks ten years younger.  He attributed his own uncommonly youthful appearance to the fact of his never having done what he called field work, or been exposed, as the common gang negroes are, to the hardships of their all but brutish existence.  He said his former master had brought him up very kindly, and he had learnt to tend the engines, and had never been put to any other work, but he said this was not the case with his poor wife.  He wished she was as well off as he was, but she had to work in the rice-fields and was ‘most broke in two’ with labour and exposure and hard work while with child, and hard work just directly after child-bearing; he said she could hardly crawl, and he urged me very much to speak a kind word for her to massa.  She was almost all the time in hospital, and he thought she could not live long.

Now, E——­, here is another instance of the horrible injustice of this system of slavery.  In my country or in yours, a man endowed with sufficient knowledge and capacity to be an engineer would, of course, be in the receipt of considerable wages; his wife would, together with himself, reap the advantages of his ability, and share the well-being his labour earned; he would be able to procure for her comfort in sickness or in health, and beyond the necessary household work, which the wives of most artisans are inured to, she would have no labour to encounter; in