form an era in Southern agriculture, and to produce the most desirable
changes in the system of labour by which it is carried on? Now, on this
estate alone, there are three threshing mills--one worked by steam, one by
the tide, and one by horses; there are two private steam mills on
plantations adjacent to ours, and a public one at Savannah, where the
planters who have none on their own estates are in the habit of sending
their rice to be threshed at a certain percentage; these have all been in
operation for some years, and I therefore am at a loss to understand what
made her hail the erection of the one at Charleston as likely to produce
such immediate and happy results. By the bye--of the misstatements, or
rather mistakes, for they are such, in her books, with regard to certain
facts--her only disadvantage in acquiring information was not by any means
that natural infirmity on which the periodical press, both here and in
England, has commented with so much brutality. She had the misfortune to
possess, too, that unsuspecting reliance upon the truth of others which
they are apt to feel who themselves hold truth most sacred: and this was
a sore disadvantage to her in a country where I have heard it myself
repeatedly asserted--and, what is more, much gloried in--that she was
purposely misled by the persons to whom she addressed her enquiries, who
did not scruple to disgrace themselves by imposing in the grossest manner
upon her credulity and anxiety to obtain information. It is a knowledge of
this very shameful proceeding, which has made me most especially anxious
to avoid _fact hunting_. I might fill my letters to you with accounts
received from others, but as I am aware of the risk which I run in so
doing, I shall furnish you with no details but those which come under my
own immediate observation. To return to the rice mill: it is worked by a
steam-engine of thirty horse power, and besides threshing great part of
our own rice, is kept constantly employed by the neighbouring planters,
who send their grain to it in preference to the more distant mill at
Savannah, paying, of course, the same percentage, which makes it a very