that it was no longer worth cultivating; and the head of the F- family, leaving his slaves to live at ease on his estates, retreated, with a household of twelve persons, to a small property of his own, which was buried in the primeval forests of Oropuche.

The Bishop had given Monsignor F- permission to perform service on any of his father's estates.

The reason of this is that most of what a man possesses he inherited, and therefore holds by a kind of right of birth; just as the old nobility bear the names only of their hereditary estates, and by the use of those names do no more than give expression to the fact that they own the estates.

Before emancipation the planters opposed education, and as far as possible, prevented the teachers from coming to the estates.

These tasks, of course, profess to be graduated according to the sex, age, and strength of the labourer; but in many instances this is not the case, as I think you will agree when I tell you that on Mr. 's first visit to his estates he found that the men and the women who laboured in the fields had the same task to perform.

Mr. has been much gratified to-day by the arrival of Mr. K, who, with his father, for nineteen years was the sole manager of these estates, and discharged his laborious task with great ability and fidelity towards his employers.

When I am most inclined to deplore the condition of the poor slaves on these cotton and rice plantations, the far more intolerable existence and harder labour of those employed on the sugar estates occurs to me, sometimes producing the effect of a lower circle in Dante's 'Hell of Horrors,' opening beneath the one where he seems to have reached the climax of infernal punishment.

The rice plantations are a great thing to fall back upon under these circumstances, and the rice crop is now quite as valuable, if not more so, than the cotton one on Mr. 's estates, once so famous and prosperous through the latter.

Judge from the details I now send you; and never forget, while reading them, that the people on this plantation are well off, and consider themselves well off, in comparison with the slaves on some of the neighbouring estates.

The whole summer, however, is passed by many members of the Georgia families on their estates by the sea.

Among various details of the condition of the people on the several estates in the island, he told me that a great number of the men on all the different plantations had wives on the neighbouring estates, as well as on that to which they properly belonged. 'Oh, but,' said I, 'Hector, you know that cannot be, a man has but one lawful wife.'

Among various details of the condition of the people on the several estates in the island, he told me that a great number of the men on all the different plantations had wives on the neighbouring estates, as well as on that to which they properly belonged. 'Oh, but,' said I, 'Hector, you know that cannot be, a man has but one lawful wife.'

While going along this delightful boundary of these two neighbouring estates, my mind not unnaturally dwelt upon the terms of deadly feud in which the two families owning them are living with each other.

The inhabitants of Baltimore, Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, whose estates lie like the suburban retreats of our city magnates in the near neighbourhood of their respective cities, are not now the people I refer to.

Born to inhabit landed property, they are not inevitably made clerks and counting-house men of, but inherit with their estates some of the invariable characteristics of an aristocracy.

The vast estates and large fortunes that once maintained, and were maintained by, the serfdom of hundreds of negroes, have dwindled in size and sunk in value, till the slaves have become so heavy a burthen on the resources of the exhausted soil and impoverished owners of it, that they are made themselves objects of traffic in order to ward off the ruin that their increase would otherwise entail.

not estates lying close to Baltimore and Charleston, or even Lesington or Savannah, but remote and savage wildernesses like Legree's estate in 'Uncle Tom,' like all the plantations in the interior of Tennessee and Alabama, like the cotton-fields and rice-swamps of the great muddy rivers of Lousiana and Georgia, like the dreary pine barrens and endless woody wastes of north Carolina.

Who, on such estates as these, shall witness to any act of tyranny or barbarity, however atrocious?

In the first place, on some of the great Southern estates, the owners are habitual absentees, utterly unknown to their serfs, and enjoying the proceeds of their labour in residences as remote as possible from the sands and swamps where their rice and cotton grow, and their slaves bow themselves under the eye of the white overseer, and the lash of the black driver.

But the owner who at these distant intervals of months or years revisits his estates, is looked upon as a returning providence by the poor negroes.

If the owner of a plantation dies, his estates may fall into the market, and his slaves be sold at public auction the next day; and whether this promises a better, or threatens a worse condition, the slaves cannot know, and no human being cares.

On the estates which I visited, the owners had been habitually absent, and the 'attachment' of slaves to such masters as these, you will allow, can hardly come under the denomination of a strong personal feeling.

Of course I except the cities, and speak only of the estates, where the house servants are neither better housed or accommodated than the field-hands.

This is a very disgusting picture of married life on slave estates: but I have undertaken to reply to the statements of your informant, and I regret to be obliged to record the facts by which alone I can do so.

The great capitalists and monied men of the country are Northern men; the planters are men of large estates but restricted meansmany of them are deeply involved in debt, and there are very few who do not depend from year to year for their subsistence on the harvest of their fields and the chances of the cotton and rice crops of each season.