There was a law against slaves holding stock of any sort, and of course at first they did not, but gradually men who had to go out into the wilder parts of the mountains to grow their provisions, acquired live stock as well, and they held it not only on Lewis's estate, but on other men's. Lewis bought all the cattle which the industrious ones bred, good, bad, and indifferent, at an all-round price of £15 a head, and he never charged them for pasturage. Truly patriarchal in his rule was he. He believed that the slaves, taken all in all, had a fairly good time, and he was a man of letters, a man who had travelled, and whose opinion is worth considering. “As far as I can judge,” he writes in the inflated style of the time of George III. of blessed memory, “if I were now standing on the banks of Lethe with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand and were asked whether I chose to enter life as an English labourer or a Jamaican negro, I should have no hesitation in preferring the latter.” Doubtless he was quite right. His saying it only proves to me what a ghastly time the English labourer must have had at the beginning of the last century. There is another aspect of slavery that we don't often realise, but he brings it before us clearly. At the present day if we wish to get rid of a bad servant, or even one we dislike, all we have to do is to pay him and dismiss him, and we are quit of him and his evil ways; but it wasn't so easy to get rid of a slave. He had a man named Adam, a Creole, who had a bad reputation as an Obeah man. “There is no doubt of his having infused poison into the water-jars through spite against the late superintendent. He is unfortunately clever and plausible, and I am told that the mischief that he has already done by working upon the folly and superstition of his fellows is incalculable. Yet I cannot get rid of him. The law will not suffer any negro to be shipped off the island until he shall have been convicted of felony at the session. I cannot sell him, for nobody would buy him, nor even accept him if I would offer them so dangerous a present. If he were to go away the law would seize him and bring him back to me, and I should be obliged to pay heavily for his retaking and his maintenance in the workhouse. In short, I know not what to do with him.”