Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. III.djvu/133

Rh help still believing in fairies and witchcraft, in wise men and women, and I myself believe in them to a certain degree. There is still witchcraft enough prevailing, but

still, nevertheless,

What do you now say to this negro slave? Ought indeed a race of people which can show such heroes ever to have been enslaved? But this conduct of Saturday's is by no means a solitary instance of its kind in that bloody night of St. Domingo. Many slaves saved, or endeavoured to save, their masters or their children, and many lost their lives in the attempt.

My visit to the slaves' bohea was not so consolatory to me as two visits which I paid to the cottages of the free negroes in the village of Limonar, which is very near this plantation. Early one beautiful morning I set off thither on an expedition of discovery. The small houses there, some of bark, others of woven brushwood, were all built in the form of cones, with palm-leaf roofs, and surrounded with cocoa-nut, palm, and other tropical trees; so that the whole village had an African appearance, at least according to what I have read and heard, of African huts and cities. There was a certain picturesque disorder in everything—a beauty in the beautiful trees which was refreshing after the Anglo-American regularity. The huts seemed built by guess, and with as little trouble as possible, and the trees had sprung up of themselves out of the warm earth to overshadow them. Each little homestead stood in the morning sun like an earthly paradise. And they were earthly paradises, these little farms with their bark huts and palms; they were, the greater number of them, the abodes of free negroes. I was not sure of this, as yet, this morning, but I had a presentiment of it