and goodwill.  This was perfectly evident to me from the meritorious air with which the women always made haste to inform me of the number of children they had borne, and the frequent occasions on which the older slaves would direct my attention to their children, exclaiming, ’Look, missis! little niggers for you and massa, plenty little niggers for you and little missis!’ A very agreeable apostrophe to me indeed, as you will believe.

I have let this letter lie for a day or two, dear, E——­ from press of more immediate avocations.  I have nothing very particular to add to it.  On Monday evening I rowed over to Darien with Mr. ——­ to fetch over the doctor, who was coming to visit some of our people.  As I sat waiting in the boat for the return of the gentlemen, the sun went down, or rather seemed to dissolve bodily into the glowing clouds, which appeared but a fusion of the great orb of light; the stars twinkled out in the rose-coloured sky, and the evening air, as it fanned the earth to sleep, was as soft as a summer’s evening breeze in the north.  A sort of dreamy stillness seemed creeping over the world and into my spirit, as the canoe just tilted against the steps that led to the wharf, raised by the scarce perceptible heaving of the water.  A melancholy, monotonous boat-horn sounded from a distance up the stream, and presently, floating slowly down with the current, huge, shapeless, black relieved against the sky, came one of those rough barges piled with cotton, called, hereabouts, Ocone boxes.  The vessel itself is really nothing but a monstrous square box, made of rough planks, put together in the roughest manner possible to attain the necessary object of keeping the cotton dry.  Upon this great tray are piled the swollen apoplectic looking cotton bags, to the height of ten, twelve, and fourteen feet.  This huge water-waggon floats lazily down the river, from the upper country to Darien.  They are flat bottomed, and, of course, draw little water.  The stream from whence they are named is an up country river, which, by its junction with the Ocmulgee, forms the Altamaha.  Here at least, you perceive the Indian names remain, and long may they do so, for they seem to me to become the very character of the streams and mountains they indicate, and are indeed significant to the learned in savage tongues, which is more than can be said of such titles as Jones’s Creek, Onion Creek, &c.  These Ocone boxes are broken up at Darien, where the cotton is shipped either for the Savannah, Charleston or Liverpool markets, and the timber, of which they are constructed, sold.

We rowed the doctor over to see some of his patients on the island, and before his departure a most animated discussion took place upon the subject of the President of the United States, his talents, qualifications, opinions, above all, his views with regard to the slave system.  Mr. ——­, who you know is no abolitionist, and is a very devoted Van Buren man, maintained with great warmth the President’s