art for the plantation in Georgia, where I hope we are to find what is
yet lacking to us in health and strength.

I look forward with some dismay now to this expedition, in the middle of
winter, with two young children, traveling by not very safe railroads
and perhaps less safe steamboats, through that half-savage country, and
along that coast only some months ago the scene of fearful shipwreck....
I have already written you word of our last residence there, of the
small island in the Altamaha and below its level--the waters being only
kept out by dykes, which protect the rice-marshes, of which the
plantation is composed, from being submerged. The sole inhabitants, you
know, are the negroes, who cultivate the place, and the overseer who
manages them.... As early as March the heat becomes intense, and by the
beginning of April it is no longer safe for white people to remain
there, owing to the miasma which exhales from the rice-fields....

We shall find, no doubt, our former animal friends, from the fleas up
to the alligators: the first, swarming in the filthy negroes' huts; the
last, expatiating in the muddy waters of the Altamaha. I trust they will
none of them have forgotten us. Did I tell you before of those charming
creatures, the moccasin snakes, which, I have just been informed, abound
in every part of the southern plantations? Rattlesnakes I know by sight:
but the moccasin creature, though I may have seen him, I do not feel
acquainted, or at any rate familiar, with. Our nearest civilized town,
you know, is Savannah, and that is sixty miles off. I cannot say that
the expedition is in any way charming to me, but the alternative is
remaining alone here; and, as it is possible to live on the plantation
with the children, I am going. Margery, of course, comes with me....

Did I tell you, my dear Irishwoman, that we had no _potatoes_ on the
plantation, and that Indian meal holds the place of wheaten flour, bread
baked of the latter being utterly unknown?... Do not be surprised if I
dwell upon these small items of privation, even now that I am about to
go among those people the amelioration of whose condition I have
considered as one of my special duties. With regard to this, however, I
have, alas! no longer the faintest shadow of hope....

Yours most truly,
F. A. B.

PHILADELPHIA, Janu