*

Dearest E----. On Friday, I rode to where the rattlesnake was found, and
where I was informed by the negroes there was a _nest_ of them--a pleasing
domestic picture of home and infancy that word suggests, not altogether
appropriate to rattlesnakes, I think. On horseback I felt bold to
accomplish this adventure, which I certainly should not have attempted on
foot; however, I could discover no sign of either snake or nest--(perhaps
it is of the nature of a mare's nest, and undiscoverable); but, having
done my duty by myself in endeavouring to find it, I rode off and coasted
the estate by the side of the marsh, till I came to the causeway. There I
found a new cleared field, and stopped to admire the beautiful appearance
of the stumps of the trees scattered all about it, and wreathed and
garlanded with the most profuse and fantastic growth of various
plants--wild roses being among the most abundant. What a lovely aspect one
side of nature presents here, and how hideous is the other!

In the afternoon, I drove to pay a visit to old Mrs. A----, the lady
proprietress whose estate immediately adjoins ours. On my way thither, I
passed a woman called Margaret walking rapidly and powerfully along the
road. She was returning home from the field, having done her task at three
o'clock; and told me, with a merry beaming black face, that she was going
'to clean up de house, to please de missis.' On driving through my
neighbour's grounds, I was disgusted more than I can express with the
miserable negro huts of her people; they were not fit to shelter
cattle--they were not fit to shelter anything, for they were literally in
holes, and, as we used to say of our stockings at school, too bad to darn.
To be sure, I will say, in excuse for their old mistress, her own
habitation was but a very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting. What
would one of your Yankee farmers say to such abodes? When I think of the
white houses, the green blinds, and the flower plots, of the villages in
New England, and look at these dwellings of lazy filth and inert
degradation, it does seem amazing to think that physical and moral
conditions so widely opposite should be found among people occupying a
similar place in the social scale of the same country. The Northern
farmer, however, thinks it no shame to work, the Southern planter does;
and there begins and ends the difference. Industry, man's crown of honour
elsewhere, is here his badge of utter degrad