While we were at Belvidere, Mr. Howell took us to see a new chapel which the apprentices of that estate have erected since 1834, by their own labor, and at their own expense.  The house is thirty feet by forty; composed of the same materials of which the negro huts are built.  We were told that the building of this chapel was first suggested by the apprentices, and as soon as permission was obtained, they commenced the preparations for its erection.  We record this as a delightful sign of the times.

On our return to Morant Bay, we visited the house of correction, situated near the village.  This is the only “institution,” as a Kingston paper gravely terms it, of the kind in the parish.  It is a small, ill-constructed establishment, horribly filthy, more like a receptacle for wild beasts than human beings.  There is a treadmill connected with it, made to accommodate fifteen persons at a time.  Alternate companies ascend the wheel every fifteen minutes.  It was unoccupied when we went in; most of the prisoners being at work on the public roads.  Two or three, who happened to be near by, were called in by the keeper, and ordered to mount the wheel, to show us how it worked.  It made our blood run cold as we thought of the dreadful suffering that inevitably ensues, when the foot loses the step, and the body hangs against the revolving cylinder.

Leaving the house of correction, we proceeded to the village.  In a small open square in the centre of it, we saw a number of the unhappy inmates of the house of correction at work under the direction, we are sorry to say, of our friend Thomas Thomson, Esq.  They were chained two and two by heavy chains fastened to iron bands around their necks.  On another occasion, we saw the same gang at work in the yard attached to the Independent chapel.

We received a visit, at our lodgings, from the special justice of this district, Major Baines.  He was accompanied by Mr. Thomson, who came to introduce him as his friend.  We were not left to this recommendation alone, suspicious as it was, to infer the character of this magistrate, for we were advertised previously that he was a “planter’s man”—­unjust and cruel to the apprentices.  Major B. appeared to have been looking through his friend Thomson’s prophetic telescope.  There was certainly a wonderful coincidence of vision—­the same abandonment of labor, the same preying upon provision grounds; the same violence, bloodshed and great loss of life among the negroes themselves!  However, the special magistrate appeared to see a little further than the local magistrate, even to the end of the carnage, and to the re-establishment of industry, peace and prosperity.  The evil, he was confident, would soon cure itself.

One remark of the special magistrate was worthy a prophet.  When asked if he thought there would be any serious disaffection produced among the praedials by the emancipation of the non-praedials in 1838, he said, he thought there would not be, and assigned as the reason, that the praedials knew all about the arrangement, and did not expect to be free.  That is, the field apprentices knew that the domestics were to be liberated two years sooner than they, and, without inquiring into the grounds, or justice of the arrangement, they would promptly acquiesce in it!