on the few grand occasions they enjoy.[10]
These luxuries, especially the former, cost them dear, but their very
expense makes it the more necessary to work to find the means of
indulging in them. Remunerative labor is eagerly sought after. The
magnificent road now building through the island and traversing the
parish of Metcalfe, has a superfluity of workmen, notwithstanding the
shameful unfairness with which they have often been treated by the
superintendents. I have known the people go in numbers to an estate ten
miles distant, and remain there for weeks, except on the Saturdays and
Sundays, away from their homes, working hard at digging and embanking,
because they could secure one and sixpence sterling a day. I have often
had occasion to employ men on short jobs, and though not unfrequently
obliged to wait some time before securing a workman, I never suffered
delay because they were too idle, but because they were too busy to
attend to me. During my residence among them their progress in industry
became too marked to be overlooked. However negligent our observations,
we could not fail to notice the increasing patches of cane in some
quarters, the extending provision grounds in others, the multiplying
houses of the better sort, the earlier hours of going to the field, and
the later hours coming from it at night. A firm in Kingston, accustomed
to sell the implements of negro labor, found the demand for tools
increasing faster than they could supply it. And we were glad to find
that they were becoming not merely more industrious, but more skilful in
their industry. A friend, who had much to do with them, assured me that
the young men greatly surpass their parents in forecast in the laying
out of labor, and had got over the miserliness shown by the old people
in providing means for carrying it on. He said a few years before he
could not have sold a good tool, and now he could not sell a bad one. An
old negro, he remarked, would groan over a sixpence extra in buying a
tool; the young man would say: 'Come, let us have things in good style
at the start, and our profits will soon pay for them.' Not that habits
of industry are so confirmed that there are not a good many local and
temporary relapses into the old careless ways. But the relapses are
fitful, the advance is steady. Of course, with growing means their wants
rise, and increasing wants in turn react happily upon their industry.
The friend to whom I have several times