Lewis tells too of a man who was tried in Kingston for cruel treatment of a sambo woman slave. She had no friends to support her cause, nor any other evidence to prove her assertions than the apparent truth of her statement, and the marks of having been branded in five different places. Her master was actually sentenced to six months imprisonment, and the slave was given her freedom as compensation for her sufferings. Thus we see slowly through the years the position of the slave improving. CHAPTER X--THE MAKING OF CHRISTIANS The feud that raged over the religious instruction of the negroes makes a curious piece of Jamaican history. “The imported Africans were wild, savage and barbarous in the extreme; their untractable passions and ferocious temperament rendered severity necessary. They provoked the iron rule of harsh authority; and the earliest laws, constructed to restrain their unexampled atrocities, were rigid and inclement. They exhibited, in fact, such depravity of nature and deformity of mind as gave colour to the prevailing belief in a natural inferiority of intellect; so that the colonist conceived it to be a crime of no greater moral magnitude to kill a negro than to destroy a monkey; however rare their interest in them, as valuable property, rendered such a lamentable test of conscience.” Thus the Rev. George William Bridges on the negroes when their spiritual state was exercising the minds of all the religious teachers. This particular shepherd was wroth because he objected to the sectarians, that is Quakers, Methodists and Baptists, taking upon themselves any interest in the souls of the slaves. “The country already pays,” he remarks, “near £40,000 per annum for their religious instruction.” I don't know if I shall be called libellous, but it does seem to me that the Church was decidedly slack in dispensing that instruction for which she was so highly paid. She administered religion in the impersonal and dignified manner that was her wont, and the slaves might be christened if they so desired. Of course they had to get their master's consent, for it was not likely the parson was going to do it for nothing, and at the end of the eighteenth century it cost four bits a head, that is about 2s. 6d. But the clergyman was sometimes open to a bargain, and would do the whole estate for a fixed sum--about half the usual cost per head. And sometimes a whole estate would clamour to be christened. Sometimes they did it as a safeguard against some feared Obeah man, and sometimes simply to have names like the buckra. After their new name they added that of their master for a surname, and reserved the old name for common use. And then came trouble for the overseer or book-keeper, for the new Christians while exceedingly proud of being Christians like the buckras, were apt to forget their new names, and were always teasing to be told them, for, of course, they were recorded in the estate book.