the stake and turned the Human Pullet over, and then he was so thoroughly basted as sometimes to be Done a little too much, often dying on the spot from that Rib wasting. Oh, it was rare sport! I wonder whereabouts in the nethermost Hell the cunning Dutchman is now who first devised this torment; also the Dutchwoman who practised it? I can fancy Signor Beelzebub and his Imps taking a keen delight in _their_ application of the Spanso Bocko. The which I never knew it cure a Negro of the sulks. They would force back their tongues into their gullets while the torment was going on, determined not so much as to utter a moan, and, having a peculiar Art that way, brought by them from their own country, would often contrive to suffocate themselves and Expire. Their own country! That is what one of the miserable beings said when, being threatened with torment of a peculiar, outrageous nature, he flung himself into a cauldron of boiling sugar, and was scalded to death on the instant. Let me not omit to mention while I am on this chapter of Brutality--wreaked by Christian men upon poor Heathen savages, for many of them were not many weeks from Guinea and Old Calabar, where they had been worshiping Mumbo Jumbo, and making war upon one another in their own Pagan fashion--that I have known Planters even more refined in their cruelty. They would make their slaves drink salt water, and then set them out in the hot sun tied to the outside posts of the Piazza. The end of that was, that they went Raving Mad, gnawing their Tongues and poor blubberous Lips to pieces[D] before they died. Another genius, who was a proficient in his Humanities, and quite of a classic frame of mind in his cruelties, bethought himself of a mode of Torture much practised among the Ancient Persians, and so must needs smear the body of an unhappy Negro all over with molasses. Then, binding him fast to a stake in the open, the flies and mosquitoes got at him,--for he was kept there from one morning until the next,--and he presently gave up the Ghost. But nothing that I ever saw or heard of during the time of my living in the Western Indies, could equal the Romantic Torture, not so much invented as imported, by a Gentleman Merchant who had lived among the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, and whose jocose humour it was to imprison his women slaves in loose garments of leather, very tightly secured, however, at the wrists, neck, and ankles. In the same garments, before fastening round the limbs of the victim, one or more Infuriated cats were introduced; the which ferocious animals, playfully disporting themselves in their attempt to find a point of egress, would so up and tear, and mangle, and lacerate, with their Terrible claws, the flesh of the sufferers, that not all the Brine-washing or pepper-pod-rubbing in the world, afterwards humanely resorted to on their release from their leathern sepulchre, would save them from mortification. There was a