Prejudice—Its former and present character—An act of resentment —The “Prejudice Bell”—Exclusion of persons of colour from offices of trust and polished society—The dawn of better days— The assertions of some authors contradicted—Domestic character of the coloured gentry—Hospitality—A day at a coloured gentleman’s country-house—Dwellings—Marriages—Great suppression of illicit connexions within these last few years—Funerals—A scene of riot in former days—Provincialisms. Before continuing my sketches of colour, it is necessary to say something about _prejudice_. I mentioned in a former chapter, that possibly it would be better to bury such a subject in the gulf of oblivion; but upon mature consideration, I think it advisable to portray a few of its many instances as well in times past, as now. A candid mind cannot but allow the illiberality, not to call it by a harsher name, of despising or underrating persons, because it has pleased their Creator to give them less fair skins. Yet that these feelings have existed from time immemorial to the present day is a well-known fact; and the West Indies in particular has been the place where Prejudice has erected her stronghold. Although, as before remarked, the negroes were only considered as beasts of burden, their polished and urbane white masters had no objection to making them the partners of their illicit intercourse; and then, casting aside all natural affections, doomed their unoffending children, the issue of such unions, to a state of degradation. In former years, the cruelty of such an act was not, perhaps, so keenly felt by them. Without any knowledge of religion or share of education, they grew up devoid of the finer feelings. The girls, as they approached womanhood, became themselves the mistresses of white men, or, in the West Indian term, _housekeepers_, while the males were content to drag on their existence much in the same way as a tolerated spaniel, which at one moment is noticed by a gracious nod, and allowed to lick the feet of its master, while at the next it is kicked out of the apartment, or spurned from the pathway. As time wore on, and knowledge slowly progressed, the fathers of these poor children were led to send them to some place of instruction, where, besides acquiring the mere rudiments of reading and writing, they became grounded in plain, but solid learning. Having thus passed through the early stages of life, the males followed mercantile or agricultural pursuits; and as, perhaps, wealth poured in upon them, and they felt in their own bosoms their superiority to many of the white inhabitants, their eyes became more and more opened, and they more and more felt their degraded state.