expression.  He was, however, jet black, and certainly did not owe these personal advantages to any mixture in his blood.  There is a certain African tribe from which the West Indian slave market is chiefly recruited, who have these same characteristic features, and do not at all present the ignoble and ugly negro type, so much more commonly seen here.  They are a tall, powerful people, with remarkably fine figures, regular features, and a singularly warlike and fierce disposition, in which respect they also differ from the race of negroes existing on the American plantations.  I do not think Morris, however, could have belonged to this tribe, though perhaps Othello did, which would at once settle the difficulties of those commentators who, abiding by Iago’s very disagreeable suggestions as to his purely African appearance, are painfully compelled to forego the mitigation of supposing him a Moor and not a negro.  Did I ever tell you of my dining in Boston, at the H——­’s, on my first visit to that city, and sitting by Mr. John Quincy Adams, who, talking to me about Desdemona, assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgement upon her for having married a ‘nigger?’ I think if some ingenious American actor of the present day, bent upon realising Shakespeare’s finest conceptions, with all the advantages of modern enlightenment, could contrive to slip in that opprobrious title, with a true South-Carolinian anti-Abolitionist expression, it might really be made quite a point for Iago, as, for instance, in his first soliloquy—­’I hate the nigger,’ given in proper Charleston or Savannah fashion, I am sure would tell far better than ’I hate the Moor.’  Only think, E——­, what a very new order of interest the whole tragedy might receive, acted throughout from this standpoint, as the Germans call it in this country, and called ’Amalgamation, or the Black Bridal.’

On their return from their walk this afternoon, the children brought home some pieces of sugar-cane, of which a small quantity grows on the island.  When I am most inclined to deplore the condition of the poor slaves on these cotton and rice plantations, the far more intolerable existence and harder labour of those employed on the sugar estates occurs to me, sometimes producing the effect of a lower circle in Dante’s ’Hell of Horrors,’ opening beneath the one where he seems to have reached the climax of infernal punishment.  You may have seen this vegetable, and must, at any rate, I should think, be familiar with it by description.  It is a long green reed, like the stalk of the maize, or Indian corn, only it shoots up to a much more considerable height, and has a consistent pith, which, together with the rind itself, is extremely sweet.  The principal peculiarity of this growth, as perhaps you know, is that they are laid horizontally in the earth when they are planted for propagation, and from each of the notches or joints of the recumbent cane a young shoot is produced at the germinating season.