‘In Tiberim defluxit Orontes.’

If so, we shall not be surprised to find that a very important, indeed the most practically important element of Obeah, is poisoning.  This habit of poisoning has not (as one might well suppose) sprung up among the slaves desirous of revenge against their white masters.  It has been imported, like the rest of the system, from Africa.  Travellers of late have told us enough—­and too much for our comfort of mind—­of that prevailing dread of poison as well as of magic which urges the African Negroes to deeds of horrible cruelty; and the fact that these African Negroes, up to the very latest importations, are the special practisers of Obeah, is notorious through the West Indies.  The existence of this trick of poisoning is denied, often enough.  Sometimes Europeans, willing to believe the best of their fellow-men—­and who shall blame them?—­ simply disbelieve it because it is unpleasant to believe.  Sometimes, again, white West Indians will deny it, and the existence of Obeah beside, simply because they believe in it a little too much, and are afraid of the Negroes knowing that they believe in it.  Not two generations ago there might be found, up and down the islands, respectable white men and women who had the same half-belief in the powers of an Obeah-man as our own ancestors, especially in the Highlands and in Devonshire, had in those of witches:  while as to poisoning, it was, in some islands, a matter on which the less said the safer.  It was but a few years ago that in a West Indian city an old and faithful free servant, in a family well known to me, astonished her master, on her death-bed, by a voluntary confession of more than a dozen murders.

’You remember such and such a party, when every one was ill?  Well, I put something in the soup.’

As another instance; a woman who died respectable, a Christian and a communicant, told this to her clergyman:—­She had lived from youth, for many years, happily and faithfully with a white gentleman who considered her as his wife.  She saw him pine away and die from slow poison, administered, she knew, by another woman whom he had wronged.  But she dared not speak.  She had not courage enough to be poisoned herself likewise.

It is easy to conceive the terrorism, and the exactions in the shape of fowls, plantains, rum, and so forth, which are at the command of an Obeah practitioner, who is believed by the Negro to be invulnerable himself, while he is both able and willing to destroy them.  Nothing but the strong arm of English law can put down the sorcerer; and that seldom enough, owing to the poor folks’ dread of giving evidence.  Thus a woman, Madame Phyllis by name, ruled in a certain forest-hamlet of Trinidad.  Like Deborah of old, she sat under her own palm-tree, and judged her little Israel—­by the Devil’s law instead of God’s.  Her murders (or supposed murders) were notorious:  but no evidence could