I tell you that it looked
to me at least six feet long you will say you only wonder I did not say
twelve; it was a hideous-looking creature, and some negroes I met soon
after told me they had found it in the swamp, and hung it dead on the
burning tree. Certainly the two together made a dreadful trophy, and a
curious contrast to the lovely bowers of bloom I had just been
contemplating with such delight.

This settlement at St. Annie's is the remotest on the whole plantation,
and I found there the wretchedest huts, and most miserably squalid,
filthy and forlorn creatures I had yet seen here--certainly the condition
of the slaves on this estate is infinitely more neglected and deplorable
than that on the rice plantation. Perhaps it may be that the extremely
unhealthy nature of the rice cultivation makes it absolutely necessary
that the physical condition of the labourers should be maintained at its
best to enable them to abide it; and yet it seems to me that even the
process of soaking the rice can hardly create a more dangerous miasma than
the poor creatures must inhale who live in the midst of these sweltering
swamps, half sea, half river slime. Perhaps it has something to do with
the fact that the climate on St. Simon's is generally considered
peculiarly mild and favourable, and so less protection of clothes and
shelter is thought necessary here for the poor residents; perhaps, too, it
may be because the cotton crop is now, I believe, hardly as valuable as
the rice crop, and the plantation here, which was once the chief source of
its owner's wealth, is becoming a secondary one, and so not worth so much
care or expense in repairing and constructing negro huts and feeding and
clothing the slaves. More pitiable objects than some of those I saw at the
St. Annie's settlement to-day I hope never to see: there was an old crone
called Hannah, a sister, as well as I could understand what she said, of
old house Molly, whose face and figure seamed with wrinkles and bowed and
twisted with age and infirmity really hardly retained the semblance of
those of a human creature, and as she crawled to me almost half her naked
body was exposed through the miserable tatters that she held on with one
hand, while the other eagerly clutched my hand, and her poor blear eyes
wandered all over me as if she was bewildered by the strange aspect of any
human being but those whose sight was familiar to her. One or two forlorn
creatures like herself, to