[Footnote 6: This was an absurd and wicked expedient for keeping him free from family interests.] [Footnote 7: This African epithet for the whites is said, in the original, to bear the complimentary signification of 'devil.'] [Footnote 8: This is partly owing to the unwillingness of continued from previous page: the negroes to remove to an unaccustomed place; but also, I think, to their rooted conviction that the only security for their independence is in having possession of the soil.] [Footnote 9: Hanover has about one nineteenth of the whole population of the island. But the economical condition of the parishes varies too widely to make that of any one a basis for a general estimate.] [Footnote 10: In common, they are by no means either so tawdry or so ostentatious as they have the credit of being.] ABIJAH WITHERPEE'S RETREAT. For many years Abijah Witherpee had kept, in East Hampton, the largest country store for miles around, and by more than ordinary shrewdness had accumulated a snug little fortune, and with it the reputation among the country folk of being an immensely rich man. It is no trifle, as every one knows, in a small village, to be accounted its richest man, but that was the least of Abijah's honors. It appears by record that Abijah maintained the responsible--and, since Squire Adams has been gathered to his fathers, the solitary--dignity of justice of the peace in and for the county of which East Hampton formed a highly respectable portion. It was not the mere flourish of 'Esq.' at the end of the great man's name--it was the essence of the great man himself. It found him, as he was proud to think, an ordinary, commonplace individual. The good people of East Hampton saw what it had made him, and trembled. And well they might, where justice herself, in the person of the magistrate, stood in awe of her own responsibility and power. We have been told that, at the outset of Squire Witherpee's administration, he held his breath at the thought of venturing upon judicial grounds with much the same uneasiness that the tyro in science exhibits in some new and hazardous experiment. The honors of office had grown scarcely a week old upon him, when opportunity offered for a full display of the 'feeling and perspiration' (to borrow the words of our informant) 'with which he dispensed justice at the lowest cash price.'