Returning home our route was changed, and Quash the boatman took us all the way round by water to Hampton.  I should have told you that our exit was as wild as our entrance to this estate and was made through a broken wooden fence, which we had to climb partly over and partly under, with some risk and some obloquy, in spite of our dexterity, as I tore my dress, and very nearly fell flat on my face in the process.  Our row home was perfectly enchanting; for though the morning’s wind and (I suppose) the state of the tide had roughened the waters of the great river, and our passage was not as smooth as it might have been, the wind had died away, the evening air was deliciously still, and mild, and soft.  A young slip of a moon glimmered just above the horizon, and ’the stars climbed up the sapphire steps of heaven,’ while we made our way over the rolling, rushing, foaming waves, and saw to right and left the marsh fires burning in the swampy meadows, adding another coloured light in the landscape to the amber-tinted lower sky and the violet arch above, and giving wild picturesqueness to the whole scene by throwing long flickering rays of flame upon the distant waters.

Sunday, the 14th.—­I read service again to-day to the people.  You cannot conceive anything more impressive than the silent devotion of their whole demeanour while it lasted, nor more touching than the profound thanks with which they rewarded me when it was over, and they took their leave; and to-day they again left me with the utmost decorum of deportment, and without pressing a single petition or complaint, such as they ordinarily thrust upon me on all other occasions, which seems to me an instinctive feeling of religious respect for the day and the business they have come upon, which does them infinite credit.

In the afternoon I took a long walk with the chicks in the woods; long at least for the little legs of S——­ and M——­, who carried baby.  We came home by the shore, and I stopped to look at a jutting point, just below which a small sort of bay would have afforded the most capital position for a bathing house.  If we stayed here late in the season, such a refreshment would become almost a necessary of life, and anywhere along the bank just where I stopped to examine it to-day, an establishment for that purpose might be prosperously founded.

I am amused, but by no means pleased, at an entirely new mode of pronouncing which S——­ has adopted.  Apparently the negro jargon has commended itself as euphonious to her infantile ears, and she is now treating me to the most ludicrous and accurate imitations of it every time she opens her mouth.  Of course I shall not allow this, comical as it is, to become a habit.  This is the way the southern ladies acquire the thick and inelegant pronunciation which distinguishes their utterances from the northern snuffle; and I have no desire that S——­ should adorn her mother tongue with either peculiarity.  It is a curious and sad