But Lewis himself had very clear ideas as to the sort of people he was trying to help. He knew you could not expect either saints or wise men from men brought up as they had been, though the life might occasionally evolve a philosopher. “To do the negroes justice,” he writes, “it is a doubt whether they are the greatest thieves or liars, and the quantity of sugar which they purloin during the crop and dispose of at the Bay is enormous.” And he tells another lovely story of how he was taken in and his kindness imposed upon. There was a black watchman, old and sick, to whom he regularly sent soup, and then he discovered that the old scamp had hired a girl, and had a child by her, and for this accommodation he paid £30 a year to a brown man in the mountains! “I hope this fact will convince the African reporter,” he writes, “that it is possible for some 'of these oppressed race of human beings,' 'of these our most unfortunate fellow-creatures,' to enjoy at least some of the blessings of civilised society. And I doubt whether even Mr Wilberforce himself, with all his benevolence, would not allow a negro to be quite rich enough, who can afford to pay £30 a year for the hire of a kept mistress.” A nice humour of his own has Lewis. He comes down to us pleasantly through the years. He gives us many little illuminating stories about the slaves and their ways. Already there were growing up among them many little differences. For instance, a pure bred negro might not aspire to the hand of a lady with some of the blood of the ruling class in her veins. One day he asked Cubina, his body-servant, the nice boy whom he had first met on his arrival, why he did not marry Mary Wiggins, a most beautiful brown girl, and they can be beautiful. “Oh, massa,” said Cubina, shocked, “him sambo!”--that is, the child of a mulatto and a negro. But this did not always hold good. He tells another story of a slave of his named Nicholas, a mulatto. Nicholas was the son of a white man, who on his deathbed charged his nephew and heir to purchase the freedom of this natural child. The nephew promised, and Matthew Lewis the master had agreed. Nothing was wanting except to find a substitute. But a substitute, once the slave trade had stopped, was very difficult to find. Before he was found, the nephew had broken his neck, and his estate had gone to a distant heir. Poor Nicholas's freedom was once more put off. Lewis says he liked the man so much he was strongly tempted to set him at liberty at once. “But,” he adds very naturally, “if I began that way there would be no stopping.” “Another,” says Lewis, “was building a house for a superannuated wife--for they have so much decency to call their tender attachments by a conjugal name.” Which is merely to say that even the mulattoes continued African customs here in Jamaica.