it
seemed as if Niagara were rushing down upon our heads. The river
Wagwater, which is commonly about knee deep, ran the next morning thirty
feet high. The effect of this terrible visitation of nature was
heightened by the disclosure through it of one of the monuments of
ancient cruelty. At Halfway Tree, a few miles from Kingston, the seat of
justice for the parish of St. Andrew, and the place of sepulture for
many of the old aristocracy of the prouder days of the island, the rain
washed up an iron cage, just of size to contain a human form, and so
arranged with bars and spikes as to make it certain that the wretched
victim could only stand in one long agony of torture. Along with it were
found the bones of a woman, who had to appearance perished in this
hideous apparatus. This dreadful revelation of the past struck horror
throughout the island. The cage, with its sad contents, is still
preserved in the collection of the Society of Arts.

The remarkable religious movement of 1861, which produced fruits so
excellent in some parts of the island, in Kingston appears to have
degenerated wholly into froth and noise. But there are some agencies of
spiritual and temporal good working among the lower classes with happy
effect. If they do not operate appreciably in changing the general
character of the feculent mass, at least they rescue from it many who in
the great day of account will call their authors blessed. I may mention
particularly the charitable institutions of the excellent rector, Rev.
Duncan Campbell, the reformatory for girls under the special patronage
of the Rev. Mr. Watson, United Presbyterian, the vigorous efforts of
Rev. William Gardner and his people, and many others less familiar to
me, but doubtless not less worthy of mention. But Kingston offers such
attractions to the very worst of the negro population, which, at the
highest, has so much of barbarism and ignorance, that it will long
continue a most forbidding and certainly a very unfair specimen of an
emancipated race.

But, forlorn as Kingston is in itself, it is magnificently situated.
Before it stretches for six miles in breadth the noble harbor, the sight
of whose brilliant blue waters, sparkling in the sun, imparts a
delicious refreshment as the eye catches a glimpse of them at the end of
the long sandy streets. Inward stretches, sloping gently up to the
mountains, the beautiful plain of Liguanea, about eight miles in
breadth, scattered over with