share of natural pride and self-importance; but these defects have been but rarely and transiently manifested, and have scarcely occasioned an hour’s uneasiness at any time in our household.  Her religious knowledge, notwithstanding the pious care of her Moravian instructors in Antigua, is still but very limited, and her views of christianity indistinct; but her profession, whatever it may have of imperfection, I am convinced, has nothing of insincerity.  In short, we consider her on the whole as respectable and well-behaved a person in her station, as any domestic, white or black, (and we have had ample experience of both colours,) that we have ever had in our service.

But after all, Mary’s character, important though its exculpation be to her, is not really the point of chief practical interest in this case.  Suppose all Mr. Wood’s defamatory allegations to be true—­suppose him to be able to rake up against her out of the records of the Antigua police, or from the veracious testimony of his brother colonists, twenty stories as bad or worse than what he insinuates—­suppose the whole of her own statement to be false, and even the whole of her conduct since she came under our observation here to be a tissue of hypocrisy;—­suppose all this—­and leave the negro woman as black in character as in complexion,[21]—­yet it would affect not the main facts—­which are these.—­1.  Mr. Wood, not daring in England to punish this woman arbitrarily, as he would have done in the West Indies, drove her out of his house, or left her, at least, only the alternative of returning instantly to Antigua, with the certainty of severe treatment there, or submitting in silence to what she considered intolerable usage in his household. 2.  He has since obstinately persisted in refusing her manumission, to enable her to return home in security, though repeatedly offered more than ample compensation for her value as a slave; and this on various frivolous pretexts, but really, and indeed not unavowedly, in order to punish her for leaving his service in England, though he himself had professed to give her that option.  These unquestionable facts speak volumes.[22]

[Footnote 21:  If it even were so, how strong a plea of palliation might not the poor negro bring, by adducing the neglect of her various owners to afford religious instruction or moral discipline, and the habitual influence of their evil example (to say the very least,) before her eyes?  What moral good could she possibly learn—­what moral evil could she easily escape, while under the uncontrolled power of such masters as she describes Captain I——­ and Mr. D——­ of Turk’s Island?  All things considered, it is indeed wonderful to find her such as she now is.  But as she has herself piously expressed it, “that God whom then she knew not mercifully preserved her for better things.”]