On visiting the Infirmary to-day, I was extremely pleased with the increased cleanliness and order observable in all the rooms.  Two little filthy children, however, seemed to be still under the ancien regime of non-ablution; but upon my saying to the old nurse Molly, in whose ward they were, ’Why, Molly, I don’t believe you have bathed those children to-day,’ she answered, with infinite dignity, ’Missis no b’lieve me wash um piccaninny! and yet she tress me wid all um niggar when ’em sick.’  The injured innocence and lofty conscious integrity of this speech silenced and abashed me; and yet I can’t help it, but I don’t believe to this present hour that those children had had any experience of water, at least not washing water, since they first came into the world.

I rowed over to Darien again, to make some purchases, yesterday; and enquiring the price of various articles, could not but wonder to find them at least three times as dear as in your northern villages.  The profits of these southern shopkeepers (who, for the most part, are thoroughbred Yankees, with the true Yankee propensity to trade, no matter on how dirty a counter, or in what manner of wares) are enormous.  The prices they ask for everything, from coloured calicoes for negro dresses to pianofortes (one of which, for curiosity sake, I enquired the value of), are fabulous, and such as none but the laziest and most reckless people in the world would consent to afford.  On our return we found the water in the cut so extremely low that we were obliged to push the boat through it, and did not accomplish it without difficulty.  The banks of this canal, when they are thus laid bare, present a singular appearance enough,—­two walls of solid mud, through which matted, twisted, twined, and tangled, like the natural veins of wood, runs an everlasting net of indestructible roots, the thousand toes of huge cypress feet.  The trees have been cut down long ago from the soil, but these fangs remain in the earth without decaying for an incredible space of time.  This long endurance of immersion is one of the valuable properties of these cypress roots; but though excellent binding stuff for the sides of a canal, they must be pernicious growth in any land used for cultivation that requires deep tillage.  On entering the Altamaha, we found the tide so low that we were much obstructed by the sand banks, which, but for their constant shifting, would presently take entire possession of this noble stream, and render it utterly impassable from shore to shore, as it already is in several parts of the channel at certain seasons of the tide.  On landing, I was seized hold of by a hideous old negress, named Sinda, who had come to pay me a visit, and of whom Mr. ——­ told me a strange anecdote.  She passed at one time for a prophetess among her fellow slaves on the plantation, and had acquired such an ascendancy over them that, having given out, after the fashion of Mr. Miller, that the world was to come to an end at