Dear E——.  I have been riding into the swamp behind the new house; I had a mind to survey the ground all round it before going away, to see what capabilities it afforded for the founding of a garden, but I confess it looked very unpromising.  Trying to return by another way, I came to a morass, which, after contemplating, and making my horse try for a few paces, I thought it expedient not to attempt.  A woman called Charlotte, who was working in the field, seeing my dilemma and the inglorious retreat I was about to make, shouted to me at the top of her voice, ’You no turn back, missis! if you want to go through, send, missis, send! you hab slave enough, nigger enough, let ’em come, let ’em fetch planks, and make de bridge; what you say dey must do,—­send, missis, send, missis!’ It seemed to me, from the lady’s imperative tone in my behalf, that if she had been in my place, she would presently have had a corduroy road through the swamp of prostrate ‘niggers,’ as she called her family in Ham, and ridden over the same dry-hoofed; and to be sure, if I pleased, so might I, for, as she very truly said, ‘what you say, missis, they must do.’  Instead of summoning her sooty tribe, however, I backed my horse out of the swamp, and betook myself to another pretty woodpath, which only wants widening to be quite charming.  At the end of this, however, I found swamp the second, and out of this having been helped by a grinning facetious personage, most appropriately named Pun, I returned home in dudgeon, in spite of what dear Miss M——­ calls the ‘moral suitability’ of finding a foul bog at the end of every charming wood path or forest ride in this region.

In the afternoon, I drove to Busson Hill, to visit the people there.  I found that both the men and women had done their work at half-past three.  Saw Jema with her child, that ridiculous image of Driver Bran, in her arms, in spite of whose whitey brown skin she still maintains that its father is a man as black as herself—­and she (to use a most extraordinary comparison I heard of a negro girl making with regard to her mother) is as black as ‘de hinges of hell.’  Query:  Did she really mean hinges—­or angels?  The angels of hell is a polite and pretty paraphrase for devils, certainly.  In complimenting a woman, called Joan, upon the tidy condition of her house, she answered, with that cruel humility that is so bad an element in their character, ’Missis no ‘spect to find coloured folks’ house clean as white folks.’  The mode in which they have learned to accept the idea of their own degradation and unalterable inferiority, is the most serious impediment that I see in the way of their progress, since assuredly, ‘self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.’  In the same way yesterday, Abraham the cook, in speaking of his brother’s theft at the rice island, said ’it was a shame even for a coloured man to do such things.’  I labour hard, whenever any such observation is made, to explain to them that