his purely African appearance, are painfully compelled to forego the
mitigation of supposing him a Moor and not a negro. Did I ever tell you of
my dining in Boston, at the H----'s, on my first visit to that city, and
sitting by Mr. John Quincy Adams, who, talking to me about Desdemona,
assured me, with a most serious expression of sincere disgust, that he
considered all her misfortunes as a very just judgement upon her for
having married a 'nigger?' I think if some ingenious American actor of
the present day, bent upon realising Shakespeare's finest conceptions,
with all the advantages of modern enlightenment, could contrive to slip in
that opprobrious title, with a true South-Carolinian anti-Abolitionist
expression, it might really be made quite a point for Iago, as, for
instance, in his first soliloquy--'I hate the nigger,' given in proper
Charleston or Savannah fashion, I am sure would tell far better than 'I
hate the Moor.' Only think, E----, what a very new order of interest the
whole tragedy might receive, acted throughout from this standpoint, as the
Germans call it in this country, and called 'Amalgamation, or the Black
Bridal.'

On their return from their walk this afternoon, the children brought home
some pieces of sugar-cane, of which a small quantity grows on the island.
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. You may have seen this vegetable, and must,
at any rate, I should think, be familiar with it by description. It is a
long green reed, like the stalk of the maize, or Indian corn, only it
shoots up to a much more considerable height, and has a consistent pith,
which, together with the rind itself, is extremely sweet. The principal