sister, or friend, will be coming by to-night;
and she is leaving a direction to the land of
freedom, for the fugitive to read in the moonlight,
and for the waves to efface before
morning.  Farther round, even as far as the
Mississippi, there is a curious local method
of writing.  A pretty lady reclines on a
couch, under a mosquito-bar—a complete
enclosure of muslin.  As her little slave
fans her with a feather fan, she comes to a
stand with her fancy work.  She has lent the
pattern to Mrs. A., on the next plantation.
She must send for it; but, if she rises to
write a note, it will let in the mosquitos,
and be fatiguing, this hot day; and there is
no use in sending messages by negroes.  She
bids the child bring her a magnolia blossom.
On that broad, smooth, juicy petal she
writes with her needle.  She asks for her
pattern, and proposes an evening drive.
On a similar petal, comes back the acceptance
of the invitation.  In the certainty
that negroes cannot read, very curious jokes
and domestic stories travel on these snowy
tablets from neighbour to neighbour.  The
messengers meantime look on with awe;
though not quite in the spirit of fetish
worship rendered by certain South Sea
islanders, who trembled before a shaving,
when a missionary had written on
it.  He wanted his chisel; and he
wrote for it, with his pencil, on a shaving.
When the messenger saw his wife rise and
go to the tool-chest, and take out the right
tool, the perspiration ran off his face: he
thought the chip had told the lady what was
wanted, in a voice too fine for unenchanted
ears to hear.  So he and his fellows
worshipped it.  The Louisiana negroes know a
little better than that; but they carry the
delicate missives, without seal or envelope,
in entire ignorance what those pale green
marks may mean.  The ladies on couches
would tell us that here we may see
the convenience of servants who cannot
read.

Further up that great river, in the wild
parts where settlers live miles from each other,
paper is yet wanted for copy-books.  But,
however much wanted, it cannot be had.  The
Catholic priest is there, and the nun, going from
house to house, in all weathers, through the
wild forest: the priest offering worship on
Sundays, and the nun offering schooling on
week days.  But here is no paper!  The
travelling glazier does not come so far;
and the last sheet of paper was greased and put
up as a window pane: and, now that another
pane is broken, the boys are planning to fill
it up with bladder or snake-skin.  How is
the writing lesson to be managed, in the
evenings or bad weather, when there can be
no writing on clay or sand before the door?
Priest and nun know what is done in Arab
villages, where the sacred command of the
Koran, to teach all children, is observed,
under difficulties; and they now do the like.
They get wax—not so easily obtainable as
in eastern countries; but they get it.  The
boys track the wild bees home to their hollow
tree; the father fells the tree; half-a-dozen
such operations provide wax for several tablets.
Melted, purified, and smoothly spread over a
framed piece of wood, this wax serves well—
long after all paper is consumed, slates broken,
and sand or clay unattainable.

Within the wide circle of these shifts, there
are more expedients; but, from different
causes, and of a totally different kind.  The
reason why people are put to shifts in the more
thickly inhabited parts of the United States
is, that the inhabitants use three times as much
paper per head as we British do—three times
as many pounds weight per head, even though
the three millions of slaves are included, who
cannot write or read.  Except idiots, the
blind, and slaves, everybody in that country
reads and writes; and more persons appear
in print than in any country since the alphabet
was made.  There, every child has its
copy-book in its place at school.  There, every
log-house on the prairie has its shelf of books.
Next to the church and the tavern, the printing–
press is set up in every raw settlement;
and a raw newspaper appears; probably on
whity-brown paper, and in mixed type, with
italics and Roman letters, capitals and
diphthongs thrown together very curiously; but
still—a newspaper.  Books are printed in
the great cities, not by the thousand or
fifteen hundred, but by the five or ten thousand;
for the readers are reckoned by millions.
The Americans have cheapened their
postage, as we have done; and the increase
of correspondence is in yet larger proportion,
because families are more widely separated,
and all are able to write.  There is another
reason for their larger consumption
of paper (of a coarser kind than writing–
paper) which is truly mortifying to us in
England.  There are manufactures in which we
and they run so exactly abreast that neither
can afford the slightest disadvantage in the
sale without losing the market: our paper
duty is a disadvantage; and we lose the
market.  The cost of the mere wrappers of a
multitude of articles made at Birmingham
and Sheffield precisely absorbs the profits to
be obtained in African and Asiatic markets;
and the Americans nearly sweep that market
from us.  Wanting all this paper, what do the
Americans do to get it?  This is a question
of immense importance to us, because we
cannot, by any means yet tried, get anything
like enough paper; and the scarcity and
dearness of it now constitute what may be called,
without exaggeration, a national calamity.
Our supply was short, the quality of our
paper poor, and the price high, before the last
doubling of our population; before the penny
postage so immensely multiplied our population;
before free trade expanded our commerce;
before the advertisement duty was
taken off.  Now, while all this new demand