anti-slavery sentiment, by the exposures made in this case of the real condition of affairs in the British slave colonies. It excited, to a degree that was irresistible and uncontrollable, that storm of public indignation against what was more and more felt every day to be a national shame and a national crime, before which the monster evil fell to rise no more. Nor did the pro-slavery rector, who was equally the persecutor of religion and the oppressor of the Negro, escape a terrible punishment in this life, as we show in another of these narratives. Where human justice had been evaded and set at nought, Divine retribution followed. Horror thrilled through thousands of hearts, as they listened to the tragic details of that fearful catastrophe, which brought incurable sorrow to the home, and crushed the heart, of the clerical oppressor of the quadroon slave. (See Narrative entitled, "Driving away the Rooks.")

sacrificed, on these occasions. One planter, who had joined with a mob to break into the dwelling of a missionary, and put him to death after a barbarous fashion, paid the penalty of his folly with his life. The assailing party were driven back by the vigorous arms of a few coloured men, when this unfortunate man fell, through mistake in the partial darkness, into the hands of his own party, who, supposing that they had got the missionary into their power, dealt upon him such severe blows as to fracture his skull before they discovered their mistake. After he had lingered for some time in great suffering, never able to resume his employment, the wounds he had received brought him prematurely to the grave; his dying hours being cheered by the prayers and counsels of one of the missionaries whom he had sought to destroy.

For some months the Colonial Church Union rules the colony, and all other authority is virtually superseded. The magistrates are compelled to do its bidding, and use their authority according to its designs; every jury box in the land is under its control; and the feeble governor, and the officers of the government, all yield a willing, or unwilling, submission to its dictates. In some parts of the island, where the missionary sanctuaries have been left standing through fear of collision with the free black and coloured men, the magistrates, acting under instructions from the Colonial Union, have closed them and suspended religious services, scattering the congregation and imprisoning the minister. The missionaries, threatened with violence, or brutally assailed by fierce mobs, who break into their houses at night, apply to the magistrates for the protection and redress to which, as British subjects, they are entitled; but are told, "We dare not interfere." They then state their grievances to the governor, as the chief magistrate and representative of the sovereign, and are informed by him, "I cannot help you. You must, if you are aggrieved, apply to the courts of justice." They know well that this will be in vain; yet they carry their complaints before the courts through every

shutting them up in unbroken night, and confining the exercise of those illimitable and immortal faculties with which the Almighty Creator has endowed them to the wielding of the hoe, and the culture and manufacture of the sugarcane. No light of knowledge may be suffered to dawn on their minds, no religious influence to reach their souls, redeemed as they have been with an infinite price, lest the dollars and cents invested in the human cattle should be sacrificed, and the slave-holders should lose the privilege of living in comfort and splendour upon the unremunerated toil, the forced labour, and the blighted, wasted energies, of the masses whom they systematically plunder of rights more precious than any other earthly possession.

There has been a wide-spread insurrection amongst the slaves in a neighbouring district of the island. The favourite slave of a respectable family conceived the idea of effecting the liberation of the three hundred and fifty thousand of his race held in bondage within those shores. He had himself never felt the extreme bitterness of the condition of a slave; for he had never been subject to the harassing, wasting toil of the cane field, or the brutal, sanguinary cruelty which fell to the lot of many around him. He was born to an inheritance of slavery, because he was guilty of the crime of having a slave mother. She was, however, a favourite domestic in her master's household; and her lively boy, black as polished jet, became the pet and plaything of the family, bearing his owner's name, and treated with as much indulgence as any of the troop of blooming white girls whose sports he shared on almost equal terms. As he grew up to manhood, the same kindly treatment was continued to him, and his master had him taught a trade by which he might earn, without drudgery, the means of living and of comfort; for he was one of the few slave-owners possessing courage to disregard the selfish policy of the slave-holding class, which forbade, in all its degrees, the culture of a slave mind.

Samuel Sharpe had been taught to read; and he not only possessed a form which might have served a sculptor as a

model of manly grace and beauty, but he exhibited mental powers of no common order; and, as a member of the Baptist communion, had obtained a considerable knowledge of holy Scripture. Though experiencing none of the cruelty so often practised upon those in bondage, he felt the degradation and wrong of being a slave, held as the property of another man, and liable like a horse to be sold and bought; and, in his intercourse with the thousands that composed the Baptist churches, his soul was stirred within him when he learnt the cruel oppression and merciless suffering to which multitudes of them were subjected at the pleasure of brutal overseers and drivers. He read the newspapers, and became acquainted with the discussions going on in the mother country regarding the abolition of slavery, and the efforts put forth by the churches of Britain to rid the nation of the guilt and shame of upholding such a monstrous system of wrong. He heard at his master's table, as well as at numerous public meetings which were held all over the island, the fierce denunciations of the slave-holding fraternity against those who were making vigorous efforts to deprive them of their property in the bodies and souls of their fellow creatures. And he listened with swelling heart to the avowal of their determination to resist the parent government in this matter, and to transfer the island to the American States, in order to secure the perpetuation of the slave system. He therefore resolved to strike a blow for the freedom of his race.

With consummate skill and secresy Sharpe laid his plans and chose his companions in the undertaking; and at Christmas, 1831, the whole of the western part of the island was panic-stricken by a wide-spread insurrection amongst the slaves. Sharpe's plan was simply passive resistance, without injury to life or property. "Bucra" (the Negro designation for a white man) "may kill some of us," he said, addressing a meeting of slaves held in secret, "and I for one am willing to die for freedom; but dey cannot kill us all, and slavery will be done away."

The insurrection was suppressed with all the horrible

atrocities which distinguish the saturnalia of martial law. Sharpe, with many hundreds besides, perished on the gallows; the land was drenched with blood, and order was at length restored. But the blow for freedom had been struck. The plan laid down by Sharpe was not carried out; but the result he aimed at was achieved. That insurrection and the events that followed gave the death blow to the system; for it demonstrated that it could not be sustained except at the cost of much blood. Before two years had passed away, the decree of the imperial government had gone forth that the crime and curse of British colonial slavery should cease to exist, and this, the darkest stain on the national escutcheon, should be wiped out for ever.

Hundreds upon hundreds of slaughtered Negroes slumber in their bloody graves; and the fones of many others, left unburied and cleaned by the rapacity of the John Crow vulture, are bleaching under the fierce rays of a tropical sun, when the meeting takes place to which reference has been made. With few exceptions those who compose it are fresh and red-handed from the scene of slaughter. In this part of the colony planters and slave-holders have, for several years, distinguished themselves in the persecution of missionary teachers; and under the influence of the rector of the parish, who has acquired an unenviable notoriety for cruelty to his own and other men's slaves, the missionaries and their churches have been assailed with the fiercest opposition. Consigned one after another to a loathsome dungeon reeking with unwholesome miasma, one missionary has already sunk into the grave, his young life cut short by persecution; and another has been compelled to seek the restoration of his health, broken down by the same cause, across the sea. It is no difficult matter, therefore, for a vicious press to induce the planters in this neighbourhood to believe and act upon the improbable assumption that the missionaries have been the instigators of the Negro insurrection, and that they are the concealed agents of the Anti-Slavery Society in England. Day after day the columns of certain newspapers teem with abuse of the missionaries. The planters are urged to deeds