The same missionary told me that in Sierra Leone, also, Obeah and poisoning go hand in hand.  Arriving home one night, he said, with two friends, he heard hideous screams from the house of a Portuguese Negro, a known Obeah-man.  Fearing that murder was being done, they burst open his door, and found that he had tied up his wife hand and foot, and was flogging her horribly.  They cut the poor creature down, and placed her in safety.

A day or two after, the missionary’s servant came in at sunrise with a mysterious air.

‘You no go out just now, massa.’

There was something in the road:  but what, he would not tell.  My friend went out, of course, in spite of the faithful fellow’s entreaties; and found, as he expected, a bottle containing the usual charms, and round it—­sight of horror to all Negroes of the old school—­three white cocks’ heads—­an old remnant, it is said, of a worship ’de quo sileat musa’—­pointing their beaks, one to his door, one to the door of each of his friends.  He picked them up, laughing, and threw them away, to the horror of his servant.

But the Obeah-man was not so easily beaten.  In a few days the servant came in again with a wise visage.

‘You no drink a milk to-day, massa.’

‘Why not?’

‘Oh, perhaps something bad in it.  You give it a cat.’

‘But I don’t want to poison the cat!’

‘Oh, dere a strange cat in a stable; me give it her.’

He did so; and the cat was dead in half an hour.

Again the fellow tried, watching when the three white men, as was their custom, should dine together, that he might poison them all.  And again the black servant foiled him, though afraid to accuse him openly.  This time it was—­’You no drink a water in a filter.’  And when the filter was searched, it was full of poison-leaves.

A third attempt the rascal made with no more success; and then vanished from Sierra Leone; considering—­as the Obeah-men in the West Indies are said to hold of the Catholic priests—­that ’Buccra Padre’s Obeah was too strong for his Obeah.’

I know not how true the prevailing belief is, that some of these Obeah-men carry a drop of snake’s poison under a sharpened finger-nail, a scratch from which is death.  A similar story was told to Humboldt of a tribe of Indians on the Orinoco; and the thing is possible enough.  One story, which seemingly corroborates it, I heard, so curiously illustrative of Negro manners in Trinidad during the last generation, that I shall give it at length.  I owe it—­as I do many curious facts—­to the kindness of Mr. Lionel Fraser, chief of police of the Port of Spain, to whom it was told, as it here stands, by the late Mr. R—–­, stipendiary magistrate; himself a Creole and a man of colour:—­

’When I was a lad of about seventeen years of age, I was very frequently on a sugar-estate belonging to a relation of mine; and during crop-time particularly I took good care to be there.