r, to convince them that I am a "boss" born.
You shall have your fill of clearing up and improving, too; I need
just such energy to make respectable my own premises. At present they
are the pigs' playground, except on Sundays, when a lot of the
plantation urchins are allowed very quietly to peep in at the windows
and learn manners from white folks. At present a young fellow, who has
lately waked up from a slouch into a man, is patiently leaning against
the sill, waiting, I suppose, for his lesson.

FROM H. W.

_Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 26._ We sat down to dinner--sixteen
Massachusetts people, six ministers' sons. Mr. Folsom and William
Allen, Miss R. and Mr. G. went home; all the rest spent the night, and
no one on a sofa. We wondered what was the last [dinner-party] as
large that had dined in this old house, but Robert says he never saw
such a large party here--Mr. Coffin used to give his dinners in
Charleston.

FROM E. S. P.

_Nov. 26._ We got to R.'s house, where he told us he had been helping
Mr. Wells all day before in boating his cotton from Morgan Island to
his home place.[149] There was about $3000 worth on the island, and he
did not choose to expose the rebels to any further temptation in
regard to it. It seems that Tuesday morning the cow-minder had gone
out to the pen with his milk-pail and never returned. Search being
made, the milk-pail and his jacket were found, and some new tracks of
shoes on the beach, also traces of a bivouac breakfast and marks of a
boat's keel on the Coosaw River beach. Nothing more is known than
this. The presumption is that a scouting party had come over Coosaw
River and bivouacked on the beach, hauling up their boat, and that,
seeing this poor man in the morning, they gobbled him up and cleared
out as they came. He was an Edisto man, of considerable intelligence,
and it is hoped his information will not be so reliable as the rebels
might wish. Mr. Wells immediately informed Captain Dutch and got Mr.
R. to help him boat over his cotton. Captain Dutch sent a guard to
patrol the island and sent his little schooner up opposite Morgan
Island in Coosaw River as an outpost.

We had an immense rush at the store yesterday, four hundred and sixty
odd dollars during the day here. R. and Wells have taken over fifteen
hundred dollars in the three days after opening their goods. Amaritta
bought over forty dollars' worth at once, and poor Juliana staggered
off with a load on her head tha