bted whether the canal would ever
be completed at all, though professionally he would not confess to such
an opinion. The waste and plunder had been incalculable. The works and
the gold that were set moving by them made a feast for unclean harpies
of both sexes from every nation in the four continents. I liked
everything about Mr. ----. Tom Cringle's _Obed_ might have been
something like him, had not _Obed's_ evil genius driven him into more
dangerous ways.

There was a small black boy among us, evidently of pure blood, for his
hair was wool and his colour black as ink. His parents must have been
well-to-do, for the boy had been in Europe to be educated. The officers
on board and some of the ladies played with him as they would play with
a monkey. He had little more sense than a monkey, perhaps less, and the
gestures of him grinning behind gratings and pushing out his long thin
arms between the bars were curiously suggestive of the original from
whom we are told now that all of us came. The worst of it was that,
being lifted above his own people, he had been taught to despise them.
He was spoilt as a black and could not be made into a white, and this I
found afterwards was the invariable and dangerous consequence whenever a
superior negro contrived to raise himself. He might do well enough
himself, but his family feel their blood as a degradation. His children
will not marry among their own people, and not only will no white girl
marry a negro, but hardly any dowry can be large enough to tempt a West
Indian white to make a wife of a black lady. This is one of the most
sinister features in the present state of social life there.

Small personalities cropped up now and then. We had representatives of
all professions among us except the Church of England clergy. Of them we
had not one. The captain, as usual, read us the service on Sundays on a
cushion for a desk, with the union jack spread over it. On board ship
the captain, like a sovereign, is supreme, and in spiritual matters as
in secular. Drake was the first commander who carried the theory into
practice when he excommunicated his chaplain. It is the law now, and the
tradition has gone on unbroken. In default of clergy we had a
missionary, who for the most part kept his lips closed. He did open them
once, and at my expense. Apropos of nothing he said to me, 'I wonder,
sir, whether you ever read the remarks upon you in the newspapers. If
all the attacks upon your writ