fame of Aleck’s literature has evidently reached Jones’s, and they are not afraid to tell me that they can read or wish to learn to do so.  This poor woman’s health is miserable; I never saw a more weakly sickly looking creature.  She says she has been broken down ever since the birth of her last child.  I asked her how soon after her confinement she went out into the field to work again.  She answered very quietly, but with a deep sigh:  ‘Three weeks, missis; de usual time.’  As I was going away, a man named Martin came up, and with great vehemence besought me to give him a prayer-book.  In the evening, he came down to fetch it, and to show me that he can read.  I was very much pleased to see that they had taken my hint about nailing wooden slats across the windows of their poor huts, to prevent the constant ingress of the poultry.  This in itself will produce an immense difference in the cleanliness and comfort of their wretched abodes.  In one of the huts I found a broken looking-glass; it was the only piece of furniture of the sort that I had yet seen among them.  The woman who owned it was, I am sorry to say, peculiarly untidy and dirty, and so were her children:  so that I felt rather inclined to scoff at the piece of civilized vanity, which I should otherwise have greeted as a promising sign.

I drove home, late in the afternoon, through the sweet-smelling woods, that are beginning to hum with the voice of thousands of insects.  My troop of volunteer workmen is increased to five; five lads working for my wages after they have done their task work; and this evening, to my no small amazement, Driver Bran came down to join them for an hour, after working all day at Five Pound, which certainly shows zeal and energy.

Dear E——­, I have been riding through the woods all the morning with Jack, giving him directions about the clearings, which I have some faint hope may be allowed to continue after my departure.  I went on an exploring expedition round some distant fields, and then home through the St. Annie’s woods.  They have almost stripped the trees and thickets along the swamp road since I first came here.  I wonder what it is for:  not fuel surely, nor to make grass land of, or otherwise cultivate the swamp.  I do deplore these pitiless clearings; and as to this once pretty road, it looks ‘forlorn,’ as a worthy Pennsylvania farmer’s wife once said to me of a pretty hill-side from which her husband had ruthlessly felled a beautiful grove of trees.

I had another snake encounter in my ride this morning.  Just as I had walked my horse through the swamp, and while contemplating ruefully its naked aspect, a huge black snake wriggled rapidly across the path, and I pulled my reins tight and opened my mouth wide with horror.  These hideous-looking creatures are, I believe, not poisonous, but they grow to a monstrous size, and have tremendous constrictive power.  I have heard stories that sound like the nightmare, of their fighting desperately with those deadly creatures, rattlesnakes.  I cannot conceive, if the black snakes are not poisonous, what chance they have against such antagonists, let their squeezing powers be what they will.  How horrid it did look, slithering over the road!  Perhaps the swamp has been cleared on account of its harbouring these dreadful worms.