more of these natives of Georgia, as we are to
return as soon as possible now to the north. We shall soon be free again.

This morning I rode to the burnt district, and attempted to go through it
at St. Clair's, but unsuccessfully: it was impossible to penetrate through
the charred and blackened thickets. In the afternoon I walked round the
point, and visited the houses of the people who are our nearest
neighbours. I found poor Edie in sad tribulation at the prospect of
resuming her field labour. It is really shameful treatment of a woman just
after child labour. She was confined exactly three weeks ago to-day, and
she tells me she is ordered out to field work on Monday. She seems to
dread the approaching hardships of her task-labour extremely. Her baby was
born dead, she thinks in consequence of a fall she had while carrying a
heavy weight of water. She is suffering great pain in one of her legs and
sides, and seems to me in a condition utterly unfit for any work, much
less hoeing in the fields; but I dare not interfere to prevent this
cruelty. She says she has already had to go out to work three weeks after
her confinement with each of her other children, and does not complain of
it as anything special in her case. She says that is now the invariable
rule of the whole plantation, though it used not to be so formerly.

I have let my letter lie since I wrote the above, dear E----; but as mine
is a story without beginning, middle, or end, it matters extremely little
where I leave it off or where I take it up; and if you have not, between
my wood rides and sick slaves, come to Falstaff's conclusion that I have
'damnable iteration,' you are patient of sameness. But the days are like
each other; and the rides and the people, and, alas! their conditions, do
not vary.

To-day, however, my visit to the infirmary was marked by an event which
has not occurred before--the death of one of the poor slaves while I was
there. I found on entering the first ward,--to use a most inapplicable
term for the dark, filthy, forlorn room I have so christened,--an old
negro called Friday lying on the ground. I asked what ailed him, and was
told he was dying. I approached him, and perceived, from the glazed eyes
and the feeble rattling breath, that he was at the point of expiring.
His tattered shirt and trousers barely covered his poor body; his
appearance was that of utter exhaustion from age and feebleness; he had
nothing under him but a mer