The first negroes were brought to serve and for nothing else. There was some faint talk of making them Christians and saving their souls, but I am afraid it was of their untilled cape-pieces the planters were thinking when they crowded down to the reeking slave ships. They who believed, if they gave the matter a thought, that any being who died unbaptized went out into outer darkness for eternity--only neither they nor we can grasp eternity--gave no welcome to the men who presently came to teach their slaves. They objected. Well, even in this year of our Lord 1922, I have actually, yes actually heard a woman, who certainly should have known better, declare: “You know, my dear, this teaching of the lower classes is really a great mistake. It lifts them out of their own class.” In all the mass of literature I have waded through about Jamaica I have met no one till I arrived at Matthew Lewis, writing of 1816, who looked at the negro with what we may call modern eyes. The Abolitionists patronised; they had an object in view, a great object, truly, but it was the cause for which they fought. Lewis was much more reasonable and sensible. We can read him as we might read a man of to-day, on the conditions around him. He saw Jamaica as I and people like me see it, and weighed both sides and held the balance true, for he is far less hampered by tradition than we might expect. He landed at Savanna-la-Mar, which lies right upon the sea-shore, a sea-shore on which there is no cliff, and where the boundaries of land and water are by no means clearly defined. A wild tropical storm swept over it while I was there, and I thought of Matthew Lewis as the rain came slanting down the wide street, turning the scene into one dreary grey whole; sky, sea, land, we could hardly have told one from the other but for the houses that loomed up, grey blotches on the universal greyness. There were no trees, barely a sign of the riotous tropical vegetation, though presently the sun would be out in all his pride, and the whole town would be craving for a little shade. But like many English colonists, the people of Savanna-la-Mar have decided that beauty, the beauty of trees and growing things, is not necessary in their town. If you want shade, what about corrugated iron? I don't know what Savanna-la-Mar was like when Matthew Lewis landed there, but it was celebrating its holidays, the New Year of 1816, when the great gentleman arrived. “Soon after nine o'clock we reached Savanna-la-Mar, where I found my trustee and a whole cavalcade awaiting to conduct me to my estate. He had brought with him a curricle and a pair for myself, a gig for my servant, two black boys upon mules, and a cart with eight oxen to convey my baggage.” It took a good deal to move a gentleman with dignity a hundred years ago. Nowadays it would have been: “We'll send the car for you, and your heavier baggage can come on by mule cart. You won't want it for a day or two, will you?”