The other day, Psyche (you remember the pretty under nurse, the poor thing whose story I wrote you from the rice plantation) asked me if her mother and brothers might be allowed to come and see her when we are gone away.  I asked her some questions about them, and she told me that one of her brothers, who belonged to Mr. K——­, was hired by that gentleman to a Mr. G——­ of Darien, and that, upon the latter desiring to purchase him, Mr. K——­ had sold the man without apprising him or any one member of his family that he had done so—­a humane proceeding that makes one’s blood boil when one hears of it.  He had owned the man ever since he was a boy.  Psyche urged me very much to obtain an order permitting her to see her mother and brothers.  I will try and obtain it for her, but there seems generally a great objection to the visits of slaves from neighbouring plantations, and, I have no doubt, not without sufficient reason.  The more I see of this frightful and perilous social system, the more I feel that those who live in the midst of it must make their whole existence one constant precaution against danger of some sort or other.

I have given Aleck a second reading lesson with S——­, who takes an extreme interest in his newly acquired alphabetical lore.  He is a very quick and attentive scholar, and I should think a very short time would suffice to teach him to read; but, alas!  I have not even that short time.  When I had done with my class, I rode off with Jack, who has become quite an expert horseman, and rejoices in being lifted out of the immediate region of snakes by the length of his horse’s legs.  I cantered through the new wood paths, and took a good sloping gallop through the pine land to St. Annie’s.  The fire is actually still burning in the woods.  I came home quite tired with the heat, though my ride was not a long one.

Just as I had taken off my habit and was preparing to start off with M——­and the chicks for Jones’s, in the wood wagon, old Dorcas, one of the most decrepid, rheumatic, and miserable old negresses from the further end of the plantation, called in to beg for some sugar.  She had walked the whole way from her own settlement, and seemed absolutely exhausted then, and yet she had to walk all the way back.  It was not otherwise than slightly meritorious in me, my dear E——­, to take her up in the wagon and endure her abominable dirt and foulness in the closest proximity, rather than let her drag her poor old limbs all that way back; but I was glad when we gained her abode and lost her company.  I am mightily reminded occasionally in these parts of Trinculo’s soliloquy over Caliban.  The people at Jones’s had done their work at half-past three.  Most of the houses were tidy and clean, so were many of the babies.  On visiting the cabin of an exceedingly decent woman called Peggy, I found her, to my surprise, possessed of a fine large bible.  She told me her husband, Carpenter John, can read, and that she means to make him teach her.  The