"On a coffee or sugar plantation the slaves are required to work about seventeen hours out of the twenty-four. Some masters are satisfied with fifteen or sixteen hours, and others exact eighteen hours at least. Here is the ordinary routine: [Illustration: SLAVES WITH COLLARS.] "The slaves are called to work at four o'clock in the morning; coffee is given to them at six, and their breakfast at nine in the forenoon. The breakfast consists of dried beef cooked with mandioca-meal and beans, together with corn-bread; and it is eaten in the field, in an intermission of not more than fifteen minutes. At noon they have a small drink of rum, and at four in the afternoon they have a dinner which is exactly like the breakfast, and eaten in the same way and time. At seven o'clock they leave their field-work, and go to the mill or the household until nine o'clock, when they are locked in their quarters, and can sleep until roused for the next day's toil." "But do they have no holidays?" [Illustration: SLAVE WITH MASK.] "Yes, they have a holiday on Sunday, but it simply amounts to a cessation of labor for three or four hours; in busy seasons the Sunday's rest is reduced to one or two hours, and with many masters to nothing at all. They have no allowance of Christmas holidays, as was the custom in the United States in the slavery days, and in many respects the life of the Brazilian slaves is harder than was that of the slaves in most of the Southern States of North America before the emancipation. [Illustration: MASK.] "But, with all the toil of the Brazilian plantations, the life of the slave is a great improvement upon what it was twenty or more years ago. The blacksmiths' shops in Rio used to expose slave-shackles for sale as freely as those of our own country exhibit horseshoes, and the demand for these things was not small. There were collars to be locked around the neck, made of round iron an inch in diameter, and provided with prongs to prevent the unfortunate wearer from turning his head to either side; there were masks, through which no food or drink could be taken; shackles for fastening the ankles together, or for binding the wrists to the ankles; chains to be fastened to the waist or ankles, and attached to logs of wood, which the wearer was obliged to drag around wherever he moved; and numberless other devices of cruelty. [Illustration: SHACKLES.] "A picture of slavery, drawn by an English clergyman in British Guiana before England had freed the slaves in her colonies, will apply to Brazil as it was twenty years ago, and as it may now be on some of the country plantations. Remember, it is a picture of English slavery as it existed in an English colony.