o sit,
day after day, for hours in the stocks--a severe punishment for a man, but
for a woman perfectly barbarous. She complained of chronic rheumatism, and
other terrible ailments, and said she suffered such intolerable pain while
labouring in the fields, that she had come to entreat me to have her work
lightened. She could hardly crawl, and cried bitterly all the time she
spoke to me.

She told me a miserable story of her former experience on the plantation
under Mr. K----'s overseership. It seems that Jem Valiant (an extremely
difficult subject, a mulatto lad, whose valour is sufficiently accounted
for now by the influence of the mutinous white blood) was her firstborn,
the son of Mr. K----, who forced her, flogged her severely for having
resisted him, and then sent her off, as a further punishment, to Five
Pound--a horrible swamp in a remote corner of the estate, to which the
slaves are sometimes banished for such offences as are not sufficiently
atoned for by the lash. The dismal loneliness of the place to these poor
people, who are as dependent as children upon companionship and sympathy,
makes this solitary exile a much-dreaded infliction; and this poor
creature said, that bad as the flogging was, she would sooner have taken
that again than the dreadful lonely days and nights she spent on the penal
swamp of Five Pound.

I make no comment on these terrible stories, my dear friend, and tell them
to you as nearly as possible in the perfectly plain unvarnished manner in
which they are told to me. I do not wish to add to, or perhaps I ought to
say take away from, the effect of such narrations by amplifying the simple
horror and misery of their bare details.

* * * * *

My dearest E----. I have had an uninterrupted stream of women and children
flowing in the whole morning to say, 'Ha de missis!' Among others, a poor
woman called Mile, who could hardly stand for pain and swelling in her
limbs; she had had fifteen children and two miscarriages, nine of her
children had died; for the last three years she had become almost a
cripple with chronic rheumatism, yet she is driven every day to work in
the field. She held my hands and stroked them in the most appealing way,
while she exclaimed, 'Oh my missis! my missis! me neber sleep till day for
de pain,' and with the day her labour must again be resumed. I gave her
flannel and sal volatile to rub her poor swelled limbs with; rest I could
no