upon the subject.

* * * * *

Dearest E----. I have been long promising poor old House Molly to visit
her in her own cabin, and so the day before yesterday I walked round the
settlement to her dwelling; and a most wretched hovel I found it. She has
often told me of the special directions left by her old master for the
comfort and well-being of her old age; and certainly his charge has been
but little heeded by his heirs, for the poor faithful old slave is most
miserably off in her infirm years. She made no complaint, however, but
seemed overjoyed at my coming to see her. She took me to the hut of her
brother, Old Jacob, where the same wretched absence of every decency and
every comfort prevailed; but neither of them seemed to think the condition
that appeared so wretched to me one of peculiar hardship--though Molly's
former residence in her master's house might reasonably have made her
discontented with the lot of absolute privation to which she was now
turned over--but, for the moment, my visit seemed to compensate for all
sublunary sorrows, and she and poor old Jacob kept up a duet of rejoicing
at my advent, and that I had brought 'de little missis among um people
afore they die.'

Leaving them, I went on to the house of Jacob's daughter Hannah, with whom
Psyche, the heroine of the Rice Island story, and wife of his son Joe,
lives. I found their cabin as tidy and comfortable as it could be made,
and their children, as usual, neat and clean; they are capital women, both
of them, with an innate love of cleanliness and order most uncommon among
these people. On my way home, I overtook two of my daily suppliants, who
were going to the house in search of me, and meat, flannel, rice, and
sugar, as the case might be; they were both old and infirm-looking women,
and one of them, called Scylla, was extremely lame, which she accounted
for by an accident she had met with while carrying a heavy weight of rice
on her head; she had fallen on a sharp stake, or snag, as she called it,
and had never recovered the injury she had received. She complained also
of falling of the womb. Her companion (who was not Charybdis however, but
Phoebe) was a cheery soul who complained of nothing, but begged for
flannel. I asked her about her family and children; she had no children
left, nothing but grandchildren; she had had nine children, and seven of
them died quite young; the only two who grew up left her to jo