The peep I had of the boiling-house was very enlivening;--for, independently of the regular watch of boiler-negroes, who were ranged beside the large poppling and roaring coppers, each having a bright copper laddie, with a long shank like a boathook, in his hands, it was at this time filled with numbers of the estate's people, some getting hot liquor, others sitting against the wall, eating their suppers by the lamp light, and not a few quizzing and loitering about in the mist of hot vapour, as if the place had been a sort of lounge, instead of a busy sugar manufactory--a kind of sable _soirée_. By the time we arrived in front of the overseer's house, we found the door surrounded by a group of four patriarchal-looking negroes and an old respectable-looking negro woman. The men were clad in Osnaburg frocks, like those worn by waggoners in England, with blue frieze jackets over them, and white trowsers. The old dame was rigged in a man's jacket also, over as many garments apparently as worn by the grave-digger in Hamlet. I had never seen such a round ball of a body. They were all hat-in-hand, with Madras handkerchiefs bound round their heads, and leaning on tall staffs made from peeled young hardwood trees, the roots forming very fantastical tops. Their whips were twisted round these symbols of office, like the snakes round the caduceus of their tutelary deity, Mercury. These were the drivers of the various gangs of negroes on the estate, who were waiting to receive busha's[1] orders for the morrow. [1] The West India name for overseer, or manager of an estate; a corruption, no doubt, of bashaw. On seeing us, the overseer hastily dismissed his levee, and ordered his people to take charge of our horses. "Mr Frenche is at home, I hope?" said Mr Twig. "Oh, yes, sir--all alone up at the _great_ house there," pointing to a _little_ shed of a place, perched on an insulated rocky eminence, to the left of the abode he himself occupied, which overlooked the works and whole neighbourhood. This hill, rising as abruptly from the dead level of the estate as if it had been a rock recently dropped on it,--rather a huge areolite, by the way,--was seen in strong relief against the sky, now clear of clouds, and illuminated by the moon. At the easternmost end of the solitary great house--in shape like a Chinese pavilion, with a projecting roof, on a punch bowl, that adhered to the sharp outline of the hill like a limpet to a rock--a tall solitary palm shot up and tossed its wide-spreading, fan-like leaves in the night wind high into the pure heaven. The fabric was entirely dark--not a soul moving about it--nothing living in the neighbourhood apparently, if we except a goat or two moving slowly along the ridge of the hill. At the end of the house next the palm-tree there was a low but steep wooden stair, with a landing-place at top, surrounded by a simple wooden railing, so that it looked like a scaffold.