"You have now received the second instalment of punishment for your atrocious crime. You will be kept here until it is convenient to remove you, being fed meanwhile upon bread and water. And when a convenient time arrives you will be placed on board a ship and marooned, which will be the final instalment of the punishment which your evil deeds have called down upon your head. The best thing I can wish you is that what you have suffered to-day, and will suffer in the future, will bring home to you the evil of your ways, and lead to your sincere repentance for them." And therewith he passed from Senor Alvaros' sight--to be seen by him no more. That same night, when the white people had all retired to rest in the great casa, Mama Faquita stole away down to the negro quarters and, going from hut to hut, roused their occupants and summoned them to a great palaver in the open space which the huts surrounded, and in which the children were wont to play. The scene was a weirdly picturesque one, for, prior to rousing the negroes, Mama had kindled a great fire in the centre of the open space; and in front of this, in a great semicircle, the negroes congregated, squatting on their heels and rolling their eyeballs in the flickering light of the flames, while Mama addressed them. They were all free, but had all been slaves not so very many years before: many of them were born Africans, with their savage instincts still practically as strong within them as they had ever been; while in the case of the rest, although their association with white men from their birth had rendered them more amenable in some respects than were the more recent importations, the tenacity with which they had adhered to their fetish-worship, with all its secret and horribly revolting customs, tended to keep them still utterly savage at heart, and only too ready to lend a willing ear to any suggestion which offered them an excuse to indulge their inherent lust for cruelty. Moreover, the African black who has been a slave is a singular combination of good and evil: on the one hand, he is capable of affection and devotion, to an extraordinary degree, toward those who have treated him well; while, on the other, he is equally capable of the most ferocious and implacable hatred of those who have injured him or those he loves; also, he is extraordinarily impressionable. Mama Faquita, being herself a full- blooded negress, was of course perfectly well aware of these peculiarities in the nature of her audience; and she played upon them as a skilled musician does upon a sensitively responsive instrument. She dwelt eloquently and at length upon the invariable kindness with which they had one and all been treated by the _amo_ and his family, and especially by the young Senorita, whom some of them at least were able to remember as a little, toddling baby, and whom they all had loved as passionately as though she had been their own; and as she spoke thus the