n burning at different points for more than a week.
What a cruel pity and shame it does seem to have these beautiful masses of
wood so destroyed! I suppose it is impossible to prevent it. The 'field
hands' make fires to cook their mid-day food wherever they happen to be
working; and sometimes through their careless neglect, but sometimes too
undoubtedly on purpose, the woods are set fire to by these means. One
benefit they consider that they derive from the process is the destruction
of the dreaded rattlesnakes that infest the woodland all over the island;
but really the funeral pyre of these hateful reptiles is too costly at
this price.

Hamilton struck me very much,--I mean the whole appearance of the place;
the situation of the house, the noble water prospect it commanded, the
magnificent old oaks near it, a luxuriant vine trellis, and a splendid
hedge of Yucca gloriosa, were all objects of great delight to me. The
latter was most curious to me, who had never seen any but single specimens
of the plant, and not many of these. I think our green house at the north
boasts but two; but here they were growing close together, and in such a
manner as to form a compact and impenetrable hedge, their spiky leaves
striking out on all sides like _chevaux de frise_, and the tall slender
stems that bear those delicate ivory-coloured bells of blossoms, springing
up against the sky in a regular row. I wish I could see that hedge in
blossom. It must be wonderfully strange and lovely, and must look by
moonlight like a whole range of fairy Chinese pagodas carved in ivory.

At dinner we had some delicious green peas, so much in advance of you are
we down here with the seasons. Don't you think one might accept the
rattlesnakes, or perhaps indeed the slavery, for the sake of the green
peas? 'Tis a world of compensations--a life of compromises, you know; and
one should learn to set one thing against another if one means to thrive
and fare well, i.e. eat green peas on the twenty-eighth of March.

After dinner I walked up and down before the house for a long while with
Mrs. F----, and had a most interesting conversation with her about the
negroes and all the details of their condition. She is a kind-hearted,
intelligent woman; but though she seemed to me to acquiesce, as a matter
of inevitable necessity, in the social system in the midst of which she
was born and lives, she did not appear to me, by several things she
said, to be by any means