of pillow for his dying agony, two or three rough sticks just raising his skull a few inches from the ground.  The flies were all gathering around his mouth, and not a creature was near him.  There he lay,—­the worn-out slave, whose life had been spent in unrequited labour for me and mine,—­without one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy, to cheer him in his extremity,—­panting out the last breath of his wretched existence, like some forsaken, over-worked, wearied-out beast of burthen, rotting where it falls!  I bent over the poor awful human creature in the supreme hour of his mortality; and while my eyes, blinded with tears of unavailing pity and horror, were fixed upon him, there was a sudden quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw,—­and he was free.  I stood up, and remained long lost in the imagination of the change that creature had undergone, and in the tremendous overwhelming consciousness of the deliverance God had granted the soul whose cast-off vesture of decay lay at my feet.  How I rejoiced for him—­and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from the inner room, whence they could see me as I stood contemplating the piteous object, I wished they all were gone away with him, the delivered, the freed by death from bitter bitter bondage.  In the next room, I found a miserable, decrepid, old negress, called Charity, lying sick, and I should think near too to die; but she did not think her work was over, much as she looked unfit for further work on earth; but with feeble voice and beseeching hands implored me to have her work lightened when she was sent back to it from the hospital.  She is one of the oldest slaves on the plantation, and has to walk to her field labour, and back again at night, a distance of nearly four miles.  There were an unusual number of sick women in the room to-day; among them quite a young girl, daughter of Boatman Quash’s, with a sick baby, who has a father, though she has no husband.  Poor thing! she looks like a mere child herself.  I returned home so very sad and heart-sick that I could not rouse myself to the effort of going up to St. Annie’s with the presents I had promised the people there.  I sent M——­ up in the wood wagon with them, and remained in the house with my thoughts, which were none of the merriest.

* * * * *

Dearest E——.  On Friday, I rode to where the rattlesnake was found, and where I was informed by the negroes there was a nest of them—­a pleasing domestic picture of home and infancy that word suggests, not altogether appropriate to rattlesnakes, I think.  On horseback I felt bold to accomplish this adventure, which I certainly should not have attempted on foot; however, I could discover no sign of either snake or nest—­(perhaps it is of the nature of a mare’s nest, and undiscoverable); but, having done my duty by myself in endeavouring to find it, I rode off and coasted the estate by the side of the marsh, till I came to the causeway.  There I found a new cleared field, and stopped to admire the beautiful appearance of the stumps of the trees scattered all about it, and wreathed and garlanded with the most profuse and fantastic growth of various plants—­wild roses being among the most abundant.  What a lovely aspect one side of nature presents here, and how hideous is the other!