zealous and celebrated a champion of slavery.  We were received with marked courtesy by Mr. B., who constrained us to spend a day and night with him at his seat at Fairfield.  One of the first objects that met our eye in Mr. B.’s dining hall was a splendid piece of silver plate, which was presented to him by the planters of St. Thomas in the East, in consideration of his able defence of colonial slavery.  We were favorably impressed with Mr. B.’s intelligence, and somewhat so with his present sentiments respecting slavery.  We gathered from him that he had resisted with all his might the anti-slavery measures of the English government, and exerted every power to prevent the introduction of the apprenticeship system.  After he saw that slavery would inevitably be abolished, he drew up at length a plan of emancipation according to which the condition of the slave was to be commuted into that of the old English villein—­he was to be made an appendage to the soil instead of the “chattel personal” of the master, the whip was to be partially abolished, a modicum of wages was to be allowed the slave, and so on.  There was to be no fixed period when this system would terminate, but it was to fade gradually and imperceptibly into entire freedom.  He presented a copy of his scheme to the then governor, the Earl of Mulgrave, requesting that it might be forwarded to the home government.  Mr. B. said that the anti-slavery party in England had acted from the blind impulses of religious fanaticism, and had precipitated to its issue a work which required many years of silent preparation in order to its safe accomplishment.  He intimated that the management of abolition ought to have been left with the colonists; they had been the long experienced managers of slavery, and they were the only men qualified to superintend its burial, and give it a decent interment.

He did not think that the apprenticeship afforded any clue to the dark mystery of 1840.  Apprenticeship was so inconsiderably different from slavery, that it furnished no more satisfactory data for judging of the results of entire freedom than slavery itself.  Neither would he consent to be comforted by the actual results of emancipation in Antigua.

Taking leave of Mr. Barclay, we returned to the Plantain Garden River Valley, and called at the Golden Grove, one of the most splendid estates in that magnificent district.  This is an estate of two thousand acres; it has five hundred apprentices and one hundred free children.  The average annual crop is six hundred hogsheads of sugar.  Thomas McCornock, Esq., the attorney of this estate, is the custos, or chief magistrate of the parish, and colonel of the parish militia.  There is no man in all the parish of greater consequence, either in fact or in seeming self-estimation, than Thomas McCornock, Esq.  He is a Scotchman, as is also Mr. Barclay.  The custos received us with as much freedom as the dignity of his numerous offices