bered that one of the most frequent items
in our own Southern newspapers used to be accounts of attempts made by
slave girls to poison their masters' families. Arsenic, which they
commonly used, is a clumsy means, almost sure to be detected; but in the
West Indies, where the proportion of native Africans was always very
large, the African sorcerers, the dreaded Obi-men, who exercise so
baleful a power over the imaginations of the blacks, appear also to have
availed themselves of other than imaginary charms to keep up their
credit as the disposers of life and death, and to have often gained such
a knowledge of slow vegetable poisons as made them formidable helpers of
revenge, whether against their own race or against the race of their
oppressors. In a recent Jamaica story of Captain Mayne Reid's, the plot
centres in the hideous figure of an old Obi-man, who wreaks his revenge
for former wrongs in this secret way, destroying victim after victim
from among the lords of the soil. The piece is stocked with horrors
enough for the most ravenous devourer of yellow-covered literature, but
nevertheless it is so true to the conditions of life in the old days of
Jamaica, that it is well worth reading for a lively sense of the time
when the fearful influences of savage heathenism, slavery, and tropical
passion were working together in that land of rarest beauty and of
foulest sin. Evil enough remains, but, thank God, the hideous shadows of
the past have fled away forever.

But these tragical remembrances and suspicions belong rather to the
plains, into which we are about to descend. Here we feel distinctly that
we are in the tropics. The sweltering heat, tempered, indeed, by the
land and sea breezes, but still sufficiently oppressive, and almost the
same day and night, leaves no doubt of this fact. Vegetation, too,
appears more distinctly tropical. The character of the landscape in the
two regions is quite different. In the uplands the wealth of glowing
green swallows up peculiarities of form, and presents little difference
of color except the endless diversity of its own shades. There are,
however, some distinct features of the landscape. Conspicuous on every
hillside are the groves 'where the mango apples grow,' their mass of
dense rounded foliage looking not unlike our maples, and giving a
pleasant sense of home to the northern sojourner. The feathery bamboo,
most gigantic of grasses, runs in plumy lines across the country. Around