profitable addition to the estate. Immediately opposite to this building
is a small shed, which they call the cook's shop, and where the daily
allowance of rice and corn grits of the people is boiled and distributed
to them by an old woman, whose special business this is. There are four
settlements or villages (or, as the negroes call them, camps) on the
island, consisting of from ten to twenty houses, and to each settlement is
annexed a cook's shop with capacious cauldrons, and the oldest wife of
the settlement for officiating priestess. Pursuing my walk along the
river's bank, upon an artificial dyke, sufficiently high and broad to
protect the fields from inundation by the ordinary rising of the tide--for
the whole island is below high water mark--I passed the blacksmith's and
cooper's shops. At the first all the common iron implements of husbandry
or household use for the estate are made, and at the latter all the rice
barrels necessary for the crop, besides tubs and buckets large and small
for the use of the people, and cedar tubs of noble dimensions and
exceedingly neat workmanship, for our own household purposes. The
fragrance of these when they are first made, as well as their ample size,
renders them preferable as dressing-room furniture, in my opinion, to all
the china foot-tubs that ever came out of Staffordshire. After this I got
out of the vicinity of the settlement, and pursued my way along a narrow
dyke--the river on one hand, and on the other a slimy, poisonous-looking
swamp, all rattling with sedges of enormous height, in which one might
lose one's way as effectually as in a forest of oaks. Beyond this, the low
rice-fields, all clothed in their rugged stubble, divided by dykes into
monotonous squares, a species of prospect by no means beautiful to the
mere lover of the picturesque. The only thing that I met with to attract
my attention was a most beautiful species of ivy, the leaf longer and more
graceful than that of the common English creeper, glittering with the
highest varnish, delicately veined, and of a rich brown green, growing in
profuse garlands from branch to branch of some stunted evergreen bushes