In the afternoon, I drove to pay a visit to old Mrs. A——­, the lady proprietress whose estate immediately adjoins ours.  On my way thither, I passed a woman called Margaret walking rapidly and powerfully along the road.  She was returning home from the field, having done her task at three o’clock; and told me, with a merry beaming black face, that she was going ‘to clean up de house, to please de missis.’  On driving through my neighbour’s grounds, I was disgusted more than I can express with the miserable negro huts of her people; they were not fit to shelter cattle—­they were not fit to shelter anything, for they were literally in holes, and, as we used to say of our stockings at school, too bad to darn.  To be sure, I will say, in excuse for their old mistress, her own habitation was but a very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting.  What would one of your Yankee farmers say to such abodes?  When I think of the white houses, the green blinds, and the flower plots, of the villages in New England, and look at these dwellings of lazy filth and inert degradation, it does seem amazing to think that physical and moral conditions so widely opposite should be found among people occupying a similar place in the social scale of the same country.  The Northern farmer, however, thinks it no shame to work, the Southern planter does; and there begins and ends the difference.  Industry, man’s crown of honour elsewhere, is here his badge of utter degradation; and so comes all by which I am here surrounded—­pride, profligacy, idleness, cruelty, cowardice, ignorance, squalor, dirt, and ineffable abasement.

When I returned home, I found that Mrs. F——­ had sent me some magnificent prawns.  I think of having them served singly, and divided as one does a lobster—­their size really suggests no less respect.

Saturday, 31st.—­I rode all through the burnt district and the bush to Mrs. W——­’s field, in making my way out of which I was very nearly swamped, and, but for the valuable assistance of a certain sable Scipio who came up and extricated me, I might be floundering hopelessly there still.  He got me out of my Slough of Despond, and put me in the way to a charming wood ride which runs between Mrs. W——­’s and Colonel H——­’s grounds.  While going along this delightful boundary of these two neighbouring estates, my mind not unnaturally dwelt upon the terms of deadly feud in which the two families owning them are living with each other.  A horrible quarrel has occurred quite lately upon the subject of the ownership of this very ground I was skirting, between Dr. H——­ and young Mr. W——­; they have challenged each other, and what I am going to tell you is a good sample of the sort of spirit which grows up among slaveholders.  So read it, for it is curious to people who have not lived habitually among savages.  The terms of the challenge that has passed between them have appeared like a sort of advertisement in the local paper, and are to the effect that they are to fight at a certain