surely it is--and it is distinctly perceptible in
the utterances of all southerners, particularly of the women, whose
avocations, taking them less from home, are less favourable to their
throwing off this ignoble trick of pronunciation, than the more varied
occupation, and the more extended and promiscuous business relations of
men. The Yankee twang of the regular down Easter is not more easily
detected by any ear, nice in enunciation and accent, than the thick negro
speech of the southerners: neither is lovely or melodious; but though the
Puritan snuffle is the harsher of the two, the slave _slobber_ of the
language is the more ignoble, in spite of the softer voices of the pretty
southern women who utter it.

I rode out to-day upon Miss Kate again, with Jack for my esquire. I made
various vain attempts to ride through the woods, following the cattle
tracks; they turned round and round into each other, or led out into the
sandy pine barren, the eternal frame in which all nature is set here, the
inevitable limit to the prospect, turn landward which way you will. The
wood paths which I followed between evergreen thickets, though little
satisfactory in their ultimate result, were really more beautiful than the
most perfect arrangement of artificial planting that I ever saw in an
English park; and I thought if I could transplant the region which I was
riding through bodily into the midst of some great nobleman's possessions
on the other side of the water, how beautiful an accession it would be
thought to them. I was particularly struck with the elegant growth of a
profuse wild shrub I passed several times to-day, the leaves of which were
pale green underneath, and a deep red, varnished brown above.

I must give you an idea of the sort of service one is liable to obtain
from one's most intelligent and civilised servants hereabouts, and the
consequent comfort and luxury of one's daily existence. Yesterday,
Aleck, the youth who fulfils the duties of what you call a waiter, and
we in England a footman, gave me a salad for dinner, mixed with so large
a portion of the soil in which it had grown, that I requested him to-day
to be kind enough to wash the lettuce before he brought it to table.
M---- later in the day told me that he had applied to her very urgently
for soap and a brush 'as missis wished de lettuce scrubbed,' a fate from
which my second salad was saved by her refusal of these desired
articles, and further instructions