The meat consisted of plantation fare-salted fish, plantains and yams, and a piece of goat mutton. Another “observe,”--a South Down mutton, after sojourning a year or two here, does not become a goat exactly, but he changes his heavy warm fleece, and wears long hair; and his progeny after him, if bred on the hot plains, never assume the wool again. Mr Fyall and I sat down, and then in walked four mutes, stout young fellows, not over-well dressed, and with faces burnt to the colour of brick-dust. They were the bookkeepers, so called because they never see a book, their province being to attend the negroes in the field, and to superintend the manufacture of sugar and rum in the boiling and distilling-houses. One of them, the head bookkeeper, as he was called, appeared literally roasted by the intensity of the sun’s rays. “How is Baldy Steer?” said the overseer to this person. “Better to-day, sir--I drenched him with train--oil and sulphur.” “The devil you did,” thought I--“alas! for Baldy.” “And Mary, and Caroline, and the rest of that lot?” “Are sent to Perkin’s Red Rover, sir; but I believe some of them are in calf already by Bullfinch--and I have cut Peter for the lampas.” The knife and fork dropped from my hands. “What can all this mean? is this their boasted kindness to their slaves? One of a family drenched with train-oil and brimstone, another cut for some horrible complaint never heard of before, called lampas, and the females sent to the Red Rover, some being in calf already!” But I soon perceived that the baked man was the cowboy or shepherd of the estate, making his report of the casualties amongst his bullocks, mules, and heifers. “Juliet Ridge will not yield, sir,” quoth another. “Who is this next? a stubborn concern she must be.” “The liquor is very poor.” Here he helped himself to rum and water, the rum coming up about an inch in the glass, regular half and half, fit to float a marlinspike. “It is more than yours is,” thought I; and I again stared in wonderment, until I perceived he spoke of the juice of a cane patch. At this time a tall, lathy gentleman came in, wearing a most original cut coatee. He was a most extraordinary built man; he had absolutely no body, his bottom being placed between his shoulders, but what was wanted in corpus was made up in legs, indeed he looked like a pair of compasses, buttoned together at the shoulders, and supporting a yellow phiz half a yard long, thatched with a fell of sandy hair, falling down lank and greasy on each side of his face. Fyall called him Buckskin, which, with some other circumstances, made me guess that he was neither more nor less than an American smuggler. After supper, a glass of punch was filled for each person, the overseer gave a rap on the table with his knuckles, and off started the bookkeepers, like shots out of shovels, leaving the Yankee, Mr Fyall, the overseer, and myself, at table.