ficiently obvious.
Pleurisy, or a tendency to it, seems very common among them; also
peri-pneumonia, or inflammation of the lungs, which is terribly prevalent,
and generally fatal. Rheumatism is almost universal; and as it proceeds
from exposure, and want of knowledge and care, attacks indiscriminately
the young and old. A great number of the women are victims to falling of
the womb and weakness in the spine; but these are necessary results of
their laborious existence, and do not belong either to climate or
constitution.

I have ingeniously contrived to introduce bribery, corruption, and
pauperism, all in a breath, upon this island, which, until my advent, was
as innocent of these pollutions, I suppose, as Prospero's isle of refuge.
Wishing, however, to appeal to some perception, perhaps a little less dim
in their minds than the abstract loveliness of cleanliness, I have
proclaimed to all the little baby nurses, that I will give a cent to every
little boy or girl whose baby's face shall be clean, and one to every
individual with clean face and hands of their own. My appeal was fully
comprehended by the majority, it seems, for this morning I was surrounded,
as soon as I came out, by a swarm of children carrying their little
charges on their backs and in their arms, the shining, and, in many
instances, wet faces and hands of the latter, bearing ample testimony to
the ablutions which had been inflicted upon them. How they will curse me
and the copper cause of all their woes, in their baby bosoms! Do you know
that little as grown negroes are admirable for their personal beauty (in
my opinion, at least), the black babies of a year or two old are very
pretty; they have for the most part beautiful eyes and eyelashes, the
pearly perfect teeth, which they retain after their other juvenile graces
have left them; their skins are all (I mean of blacks generally)
infinitely finer and softer than the skins of white people. Perhaps you
are not aware that among the white race the _finest grained_ skins
generally belong to persons of dark complexion. This, as a characteristic
of the black race, I think might be accepted as some compensation for the
coarse woolly hair. The nose and mouth, which are so peculiarly
displeasing in their conformation in the face of a negro man or woman,
being the features least developed in a baby's countenance, do not at
first present the ugliness which they assume as they become more marked;
and when the v