190
NEVIS.
who only know themselves, and to whom ignorance of shame is as the clothing of innocence before the Fall;窶馬o! these slaves know that they are naked; they live in immediate contact with their masters, whose manners they remark, and they daily see the more favored of their own color decked out with finical extravagance. Many do, indeed, become shameless by the dire force of habit, but not all; for not seldom have I watched a poor girl in the fields who has turned away from the gaze of man, and shrouded her bosom with crossed arms and declining head. I turned out of the road in going to Gingerland to see a banyan tree. It was like the pictures of it which I have seen in East Indian books; the lowest and heaviest limbs shoot out in an exactly horizontal line to a great length, and are really supported by a row of pillars decreasing in size towards the extremity of the branch; all the upper part of the tree is free from these pendent suckers, and is like any other. The jail is just such another hole as the one in Montserrat, but it was quite good enough for two of its inmates at least, while I was in Nevis. These two wretches were both, I think, free-colored men, and as atrocious criminals as ever deserved to dance upon nothing. Many slaves had at different times been missing from different estates; search had always been made upon the several occasions but without success, and it was supposed that they had escaped to a