even a dim sense of fear at the spectacle, the planter broke in at
the door and confronted the Obeah man. Had he ordered the old fellow
to do any given task about his house or grounds in the daytime, that
order would have been obeyed. What was the planter's astonishment,
therefore, when the slave calmly disregarded his command to return
to quarters, and bade his master leave the place at once and cease
to disturb the meeting, or prepare for a great misfortune. Enraged,
and fearing lest this defiance might encourage the other slaves
to mutiny, the master shot the old man dead. A few days later the
planter's wife died while seated at the table. A week after his
daughter died, a seeming victim of poison. All the latent superstition
in his nature having been aroused, he sought out another Obeah man,
to beg that he would intercede with the powers of darkness, but the
wizard was stern. He told him that the slave he had killed was the
most powerful master of spirits in the country, and that nothing
could stay the revenges of fate. When the planter reached his home
he found a letter there announcing the death of his only son in Paris.

The Matanzas Obeah Woman

On a hillock near Matanzas, with a ragged wood behind it, stood for
many years an unkempt cottage. In our land we should hardly dignify it
by such a name. We would call it, rather, a hovel. Some rotting timbers
of it may still be left, for the black people who live thereabout
keep away, especially at night, believing that the hillock is a resort
of spirits. Yet not many of them remember the incident that put this
unpleasant fame upon it, for--that was back in the slavery days. The
brutal O'Donnell was governor-general then. He found Cuba in its usual
state of sullen tranquillity, and no chance seemed to offer by which he
could make a name for himself, so he magnified every village wrangle
into an insurrection. It looked well in his reports when he set forth
the skill and ease with which he had suppressed the uprisings, and,
as he did not scruple to take life in punishment for slight offences,
nor to retaliate on a community for the misconduct of a single member
of it, he almost created the revolution that he described to his home
government. The merest murmur, the merest shadow was enough to take
him to the scene of an alleged outbreak, and he would cause slaves
to be whipped until they were ready to confess anything.

A black boy in Matanzas, arrested on sus