t the table
a niece of Mr. Harris, a modest and highly interesting young lady. All
the luxuries and delicacies of a tropical clime loaded the board--an
epicurean variety of meats, flesh, fowl, and fish--of vegetables,
pastries, fruits, and nuts, and that invariable accompaniment of a West
India dinner, wine.

The dinner was enlivened by an interesting and well sustained
conversation respecting the abolition of slavery, the present state of
the colony, and its prospects for the future. Lively discussions were
maintained on points where there chanced to be a difference of opinion,
and we admired the liberality of the views which were thus elicited. We
are certainly prepared to say, and that too without feeling that we draw
any invidious distinctions, that in style of conversation, in ingenuity
and ability of argument, this company would compare with any company of
white gentlemen that we met in the island. In that circle of colored
gentlemen, were the keen sallies of wit, the admirable repartee, the
satire now severe, now playful, upon the measures of the colonial
government, the able exposure of aristocratic intolerance, of
plantership chicanery, of plottings and counterplottings in high
places--the strictures on the intrigues of the special magistrates and
managers, and withal, the just and indignant reprobation of the uniform
oppressions which have disabled and crushed the colored people.

The views of these gentlemen with regard to the present state of the
island, we found to differ in some respects from those of the planters
and special magistrates. They seemed to regard both those classes of men
with suspicion. The planters they represented as being still, at least
the mass of them, under the influence of the strong habits of
tyrannizing and cruelty which they formed during slavery. The
prohibitions and penalties of the law are not sufficient to prevent
occasional and even frequent outbreakings of violence, so that the
negroes even yet suffer much of the rigor of slavery. In regard to the
special magistrates, they allege that they are greatly controlled by the
planters. They associate with the planters, dine with the planters,
lounge on the planters' sofas, and marry the planters daughters. Such
intimacies as these, the gentlemen very plausibly argued, could not
exist without strongly biasing the magistrate towards the planters, and
rendering it almost impossible for them to administer equal justice to
the poor ap