Although no part of the island is peculiarly favorable to constitutions of the European race, yet with prudence and temperance foreigners find this midland region reasonably healthy. The missionaries, who have mostly resided in the uplands, have but seldom fallen victims to fevers. Foreigners must not expect to live here without occasional attacks of fever; but with care, there need be little apprehension of a fatal result, except to those of a sanguine temperament or of a corpulent habit. And the general exemption from the dreadful ravages of consumption may well be thought to compensate the somewhat greater risks from fever. Even on the plains, that immense mortality of whites from the mother country which once gave to Jamaica the ominous name of 'The Grave of Europeans,' was caused as much by their reckless intemperance as by any necessity of the climate. Or, rather, habits which in Great Britain might have been indulged in with comparative impunity, in Jamaica were rapidly fatal. It is said that another cause of the excessive mortality among the overseers was that they were often secretly poisoned by the blacks. On some plantations, I have heard it said, overseer after overseer was poisoned off, almost as soon as he arrived. In most cases, I dare say, it would be found that over-liberal potations of Jamaica rum were the poison that did the mischief. But the reports have probably some foundation in truth. An oppressed race, seldom daring to strike openly, would be very apt to devise subtle ways of vengeance. It will be remembered that one of the most frequent items in our own Southern newspapers used to be accounts of attempts made by slave girls to poison their masters' families. Arsenic, which they commonly used, is a clumsy means, almost sure to be detected; but in the West Indies, where the proportion of native Africans was always very large, the African sorcerers, the dreaded Obi-men, who exercise so baleful a power over the imaginations of the blacks, appear also to have availed themselves of other than imaginary charms to keep up their credit as the disposers of life and death, and to have often gained such a knowledge of slow vegetable poisons as made them formidable helpers of revenge, whether against their own race or against the race of their oppressors. In a recent Jamaica story of Captain Mayne Reid's, the plot centres in the hideous figure of an old Obi-man, who wreaks his revenge for former wrongs in this secret way, destroying victim after victim from among the lords of the soil. The piece is stocked with horrors enough for the most ravenous devourer of yellow-covered literature, but nevertheless it is so true to the conditions of life in the old days of Jamaica, that it is well worth reading for a lively sense of the time when the fearful influences of savage heathenism, slavery, and tropical passion were working together in that land of rarest beauty and of foulest sin.