be obtained; Madame Phyllis dealt in poisons, charms, and philtres; and waxed fat on her trade for many a year.  The first shock her reputation received was from a friend of mine, who, in his Government duty, planned out a road which ran somewhat nearer her dwelling than was pleasant or safe for her privacy.  She came out denouncing, threatening.  The coloured workmen dared not proceed.  My friend persevered coolly; and Madame, finding that the Government official considered himself Obeah-proof, tried to bribe him off, with the foolish cunning of a savage, with a present of—­bottled beer.  To the horror of his workmen, he accepted—­for the day was hot, as usual—­a single bottle; and drank it there and then.  The Negroes looked—­like the honest Maltese at St. Paul—­’when he should have swollen, or fallen down dead suddenly’:  but nothing happened; and they went on with their work, secure under a leader whom even Madame Phyllis dared not poison.  But he ran a great risk; and knew it.

‘I took care,’ said he, ’to see that the cork had not been drawn and put back again; and then, to draw it myself.’

At last Madame Phyllis’s cup was full, and she fell into the snare which she had set for others.  For a certain coloured policeman went off to her one night; and having poured out his love-lorn heart, and the agonies which he endured from the cruelty of a neighbouring fair, he begged for, got, and paid for a philtre to win her affections.  On which, saying with Danton—­’Que mon nom soit fletri, mais que la patrie soit libre,’ he carried the philtre to the magistrate; laid his information; and Madame Phyllis and her male accomplice were sent to gaol as rogues and impostors.

Her coloured victims looked on aghast at the audacity of English lawyers.  But when they found that Madame was actually going to prison, they rose—­just as if they had been French Republicans—­ deposed their despot after she had been taken prisoner, sacked her magic castle, and levelled it with the ground.  Whether they did, or did not, find skeletons of children buried under the floor, or what they found at all, I could not discover; and should be very careful how I believed any statement about the matter.  But what they wanted specially to find was the skeleton of a certain rival Obeah-man, who having, some years before, rashly challenged Madame to a trial of skill, had gone to visit her one night, and never left her cottage again.

The chief centre of this detestable system is St. Vincent, where—­so I was told by one who knows that island well—­some sort of secret College, or School of the Prophets Diabolic, exists.  Its emissaries spread over the islands, fattening themselves at the expense of their dupes, and exercising no small political authority, which has been ere now, and may be again, dangerous to society.  In Jamaica, I was assured by a Nonconformist missionary who had long lived there, Obeah is by no means on the decrease; and in Hayti it is probably on the increase, and taking—­at least until the fall and death of Salnave—­shapes which, when made public in the civilised world, will excite more than mere disgust.  But of Hayti I shall be silent; having heard more of the state of society in that unhappy place than it is prudent, for the sake of the few white residents, to tell at present.