In company with a friend, we visited the principal streets and places of business in Kingston, for the purpose of seeing for ourselves the general employments of the people of color; and those who engage in the lowest offices, such as porters, watermen, draymen, and servants of all grades, from him who flaunts in livery, to him who polishes shoes, are of course from this class.  So with the fruiterers, fishmongers, and the almost innumerable tribe of petty hucksters which swarm throughout the city, and is collected in a dense mass in its suburbs.  The market, which is the largest and best in the West Indies, is almost entirely supplied and attended by colored persons, mostly females.  The great body of artisans is composed mostly of colored persons.

There are two large furniture and cabinet manufactories in Kingston, one owned by two colored men, and the other by a white man.  The operatives, of which one contains eighty, and the other nearly as many, are all black and colored.  A large number of them are what the British law terms apprentices, and are still bound in unremunerated servitude, though some of them for thrice seven years have been adepts in their trades, and not a few are earning their masters twenty or thirty dollars each month, clear of all expenses.  Some of these apprentices are hoary-headed and wrinkle-browned men, with their children, and grand-children, apprentices also, around them, and who, after having used the plane and the chisel for half a century, with faithfulness for others, are now spending the few hours and the failing strength of old again in preparing to use the plane and the chisel for themselves.  The work on which they were engaged evinced no lack of mechanical skill and ingenuity, but on the contrary we were shown some of the most elegant specimens of mechanical skill, which we ever saw.  The rich woods of the West Indies were put into almost every form and combination which taste could designate or luxury desire.

The owners of these establishments informed us that their business had much increased within the last two years, and was still extending.  Neither of them had any fears for the results of complete emancipation, but both were laying their plans for the future as broadly and confidently as ever.

In our walk we accidentally met a colored man, whom we had heard mentioned on several occasions as a superior architect.  From the conversation we had with him, then and subsequently, he appeared to possess a fine mechanical genius, and to have made acquirements which would be honorable in any man, but which were truly admirable in one who had been shut up all his life by the disabilities which in Jamaica have, until recently, attached to color.  He superintended the erection of the Wesleyan chapel in Kingston, the largest building of the kind in the island, and esteemed by many as the most elegant.  The plan was his own, and the work was executed under his own eye.  This man is using his means and influence to encourage the study of his favorite art, and of the arts and sciences generally, among those of his own hue.