The habit of murdering the superintendents and “bushas” who had done them an injury, sometimes a very trivial injury, was one that had always to be taken into account, and a negro who had no personal grudge against the doomed man could always be relied upon to help a friend. Such were the strained relations between the white and black. A Mr Dunbar was set upon and murdered by his driver, helped by two young men who barely knew the planter by sight, and they could have had no possible grudge against him except that of colour. Again and again they had missed their chance by the merest accident, but one night as he was riding home from a dinner party at Montego Bay they rushed out from behind a clump of trees, pulled him down from his horse and clubbed him to death. No one suspected the driver, but a curious superstition gave him away. Naturally, all the houses of the slaves were searched, and in the driver's Mr Dunbar's watch and one of his ears was found. The watch might have been arrived at by barter, but the ear had been kept by the murderer from a negro belief that so long as the murderer possesses one of the ears of his victim he will never be haunted by his spectre. It would be monotonous to put down the number of murders I have come across in my search for old tales of Jamaica. A book-keeper was discovered in one of the cane-pieces of Cornwall with his skull fractured, but the murderer was never discovered; and innumerable were the book-keepers and overseers who were poisoned by the women they trusted. Often the woman who mixed the draught had no idea of its being poison. She received the ingredients from the Obeah man as a charm to “make her massa good to her,” by which, says Lewis, “the negroes mean the compelling a person to give another everything for which that other may ask him.” It was always feud, feud, feud. Reading the slave books, we see how much of this bitterness must have been engendered. In crop time the slaves often had to labour all night, and frequently on Sundays they were in the cane-pieces instead of being allowed to go to their ground, and if they had not time to grow their provisions it is hardly likely these hard taskmasters made good the loss. “Great evil arises,” writes someone in the Rose Hall estate book, possibly the Attorney in charge, “to the Negroes and stock from carting canes at night. An Overseer who arranges his work with judgment will always have abundance of canes in the mill yard by commencing to carry early in the morning. It is therefore my desire that no canes are to be brought from the field after Sunset.” Judging by this book, sometimes the mills started after 7 p.m. on Sunday night and ran continuously till the following Saturday night or Sunday morning without intermission or rest for anyone, white or black. How bitter might be the black man thus worked remorselessly, even though the white man was himself driven by a higher power.