He told me too, what interested me very much, of a conspiracy among Mr. C——­’s slaves some years ago.  I cannot tell you about it now; I will some other time.  It is wonderful to me that such attempts are not being made the whole time among these people to regain their liberty; probably because many are made ineffectually, and never known beyond the limits of the plantation where they take place.

* * * * *

Dear E——.  We have been having something like northern March weather—­blinding sun, blinding wind, and blinding dust, through all which, the day before yesterday, Mr. ——­ and I rode together round most of the fields, and over the greater part of the plantation.  It was a detestable process, the more so that he rode Montreal and I Miss Kate, and we had no small difficulty in managing them both.  In the afternoon we had an equally detestable drive through the new wood paths to St. Annie’s, and having accomplished all my errands among the people there, we crossed over certain sounds, and seas, and separating waters, to pay a neighbourly visit to the wife of one of our adjacent planters.

How impossible it would be for you to conceive, even if I could describe, the careless desolation which pervaded the whole place; the shaggy unkempt grounds we passed through to approach the house; the ruinous, rackrent, tumble-down house itself, the untidy, slatternly all but beggarly appearance of the mistress of the mansion herself.  The smallest Yankee farmer has a tidier estate, a tidier house, and a tidier wife than this member of the proud southern chivalry, who, however, inasmuch as he has slaves, is undoubtedly a much greater personage in his own estimation than those capital fellows W——­ and B——­, who walk in glory and in joy behind their ploughs upon your mountain sides.  The Brunswick canal project was descanted upon, and pronounced, without a shadow of dissent, a scheme the impracticability of which all but convicted its projectors of insanity.  Certainly, if, as I hear the monied men of Boston have gone largely into this speculation, their habitual sagacity must have been seriously at fault; for here on the spot nobody mentions the project but as a subject of utter derision.

While the men discussed about this matter, Mrs. B——­ favoured me with the congratulations I have heard so many times on the subject of my having a white nursery maid for my children.  Of course, she went into the old subject of the utter incompetency of negro women to discharge such an office faithfully; but in spite of her multiplied examples of their utter inefficiency, I believe the discussion ended by simply our both agreeing that ignorant negro girls of twelve years old are not as capable or trustworthy as well-trained white women of thirty.