child could scarcely fail to detect it.

The Slave Trade, though nominally abolished, is actively pursued here,
eighty-three slaves having been landed just before my arrival, and
another cargo during my stay.

The slaves are not only a very superior race of men in point of physical
powers, but, as far as my experience of their habits went, I found them
very moral and honest. Their notions of religion were however curious.
Several were Christians nominally, but their Christianity consisted in
wearing a string of beads round the neck; and they seriously assured me
that those who wore beads went up to heaven after death, and that those
who did not went down under the waters.

I talked to many of them about their own land. None had forgotten it, but
they all expressed the most ardent desire to see it again. They call
themselves captives, not slaves, and are very punctilious upon this
point. They labour very hard here, generally in the town, paying their
masters eighteen-pence a day, and keeping the rest of their earnings for
themselves. The rate of labour must therefore be high; but they wear
scarcely any clothes, and their subsistence, which is jerked beef and
beans, costs but little. The slaves in the country are however all
obliged to work on their owners' plantations.

All the principal people in the town are concerned in the slave trade,
and their chief wealth consists in the number of slaves they possess;
therefore there is little chance of the trade being, for many years,
totally abolished.

With regard to the execution of the laws this country is much in the same