At dinner we had some delicious green peas, so much in advance of you are we down here with the seasons.  Don’t you think one might accept the rattlesnakes, or perhaps indeed the slavery, for the sake of the green peas?  ’Tis a world of compensations—­a life of compromises, you know; and one should learn to set one thing against another if one means to thrive and fare well, i.e. eat green peas on the twenty-eighth of March.

After dinner I walked up and down before the house for a long while with Mrs. F——­, and had a most interesting conversation with her about the negroes and all the details of their condition.  She is a kind-hearted, intelligent woman; but though she seemed to me to acquiesce, as a matter of inevitable necessity, in the social system in the midst of which she was born and lives, she did not appear to me, by several things she said, to be by any means in love with it.  She gave me a very sad character of Mr. K——­, confirming by her general description of him the impression produced by all the details I have received from our own people.  As for any care for the moral or religious training of the slaves, that, she said, was a matter that never troubled his thoughts; indeed, his only notion upon the subject of religion, she said, was, that it was something not bad for white women and children.

We drove home by moonlight; and as we came towards the woods in the middle of the island, the fire-flies glittered out from the dusky thickets as if some magical golden veil was every now and then shaken out into the darkness.  The air was enchantingly mild and soft, and the whole way through the silvery night delightful.

My dear friend, I have at length made acquaintance with a live rattlesnake.  Old Scylla had the pleasure of discovering it while hunting for some wood to burn.  Israel captured it, and brought it to the house for my edification.  I thought it an evil-looking beast, and could not help feeling rather nervous while contemplating it, though the poor thing had a noose round its neck and could by no manner of means have extricated itself.  The flat head, and vivid vicious eye, and darting tongue, were none of them lovely to behold; but the sort of threatening whirr produced by its rattle, together with the deepening and fading of the marks on its skin, either with its respiration or the emotions of fear and anger it was enduring, were peculiarly dreadful and fascinating.  It was quite a young one, having only two or three rattles in its tail.  These, as you probably know, increase in number by one annually; so that you can always tell the age of the amiable serpent you are examining—­if it will let you count the number of joints of its rattle.  Captain F——­ gave me the rattle of one which had as many as twelve joints.  He said it had belonged to a very large snake which had crawled from under a fallen tree trunk on which his children were playing.  After exhibiting his interesting