with a very few persons.  His people had been so well treated, and had so many comforts, that they would not be at all likely to abandon the estate! [Mark that!] Whose are the people that will desert after 1840?  Not Thomas McCornock’s, Esq.! They are too well situated.  Whose then will desert? Mr. Jocken’s, or in other words, those who are ill-treated, who are cruelly driven, whose fences are broken down, and whose provision grounds are exposed to the cattle.  They, and they alone, will retire to the woods who can’t get food any where else!

The custos thought the apprentices were behaving very ill.  On being asked if he had any trouble with his, he said, O, no! his apprentices did quite well, and so did the apprentices generally, in the Plantain Garden River Valley.  But in far off parishes, he heard that they were very refractory and troublesome.

The custos testified that the negroes were very easily managed.  He said he had often thought that he would rather have the charge of six hundred negroes, than of two hundred English sailors.  He spoke also of the temperate habits of the negroes.  He had been in the island twenty-two years, and he had never seen a negro woman drunk, on the estate.  It was very seldom that the men got drunk.  There were not more than ten men on Golden Grove, out of a population of five hundred, who were in the habit of occasionally getting intoxicated.  He also remarked that the negroes were a remarkable people for their attention to the old and infirm among them; they seldom suffered them to want, if it was in their power to supply them.  Among other remarks of the custos, was this sweeping declaration—­“No man in his senses can pretend to defend slavery.”

After spending a day at Golden Grove, we proceeded to the adjacent estate of Amity Hall.  On entering the residence of the manager, Mr. Kirkland, we were most gratefully surprised to find him engaged in family prayers.  It was the first time and the last that we heard the voice of prayer in a Jamaican planter’s house.  We were no less gratefully surprised to see a white lady, to whom we were introduced as Mrs. Kirkland, and several modest and lovely little children.  It was the first and the last family circle that we were permitted to see among the planters of that licentious colony.  The motley group of colored children—­of every age from tender infancy—­which we found on other estates, revealed the state of domestic manners among the planters.

Mr. K. regarded the abolition of slavery as a great blessing to the colony; it was true that the apprenticeship was a wretchedly bad system, but notwithstanding, things moved smoothly on his estate.  He informed us that the negroes on Amity Hall had formerly borne the character of being the worst gang in the parish; and when he first came to the estate, he found that half the truth had not been told of them; but they