she personally superintended, and then sent them to Five Pound—­the swamp Botany Bay of the plantation, of which I have told you—­with further orders to the drivers to flog them every day for a week.  Now, E——­, if I make you sick with these disgusting stories, I cannot help it—­they are the life itself here; hitherto I have thought these details intolerable enough, but this apparition of a female fiend in the middle of this hell I confess adds an element of cruelty which seems to me to surpass all the rest.  Jealousy is not an uncommon quality in the feminine temperament; and just conceive the fate of these unfortunate women between the passions of their masters and mistresses, each alike armed with power to oppress and torture them.  Sophy went on to say that Isaac was her son by driver Morris, who had forced her while she was in her miserable exile at Five Pound.  Almost beyond my patience with this string of detestable details, I exclaimed—­foolishly enough, heaven knows—­’Ah, but don’t you know, did nobody ever tell or teach any of you, that it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?’ Alas, E——­, what could the poor creature answer but what she did, seizing me at the same time vehemently by the wrist:  ’Oh yes, missis, we know—­we know all about dat well enough; but we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from de whip; when he made me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? he have strength to make me.’  I have written down the woman’s words; I wish I could write down the voice and look of abject misery with which they were spoken.  Now, you will observe that the story was not told to me as a complaint; it was a thing long past and over, of which she only spoke in the natural course of accounting for her children to me.  I make no comment; what need, or can I add, to such stories?  But how is such a state of things to endure?—­and again, how is it to end?  While I was pondering, as it seemed to me, at the very bottom of the Slough of Despond, on this miserable creature’s story, another woman came in (Tema), carrying in her arms a child the image of the mulatto Bran; she came to beg for flannel.  I asked her who was her husband.  She said she was not married.  Her child is the child of bricklayer Temple, who has a wife at the rice island.  By this time, what do you think of the moralities, as well as the amenities, of slave life?  These are the conditions which can only be known to one who lives among them; flagrant acts of cruelty may be rare, but this ineffable state of utter degradation, this really beastly existence, is the normal condition of these men and women, and of that no one seems to take heed, nor have I ever heard it described so as to form any adequate conception of it, till I found myself plunged into it;—­where and how is one to begin the cleansing of this horrid pestilential immondezzio of an existence?

It is Wednesday, the 20th of March; we cannot stay here much longer; I wonder if I shall come back again! and whether, when I do, I shall find the trace of one idea of a better life left in these poor people’s minds by my sojourn among them.