The militia was composed naturally of planters, the officers being in many instances men whose property had been destroyed by the insurgents, and who regarded themselves as ruined or reduced to the verge of ruin by the revolted negroes. We cannot but agree with Bleby that these were the last men who should have tried them, but try them they did, and the reprisals were terrible. As in the old days the Romans in Sicily, if I remember rightly, crucified their rebellious slaves along the sea-shore, so these Jamaican planters hanged and shot the deluded people without finding out whether they were guilty or not. After six weeks of trials, one of the newspapers at Montego Bay gravely announced: “The executions during the week have been considerably diminished, being in number only fourteen.” They hanged them by twos and threes in the public market-place and left them hanging there till another lot were due, when they cut down the bodies and left them lying on the ground till the workhouse negroes came out with carts in the evening and took them away, to cast them into a pit dug for the purpose a little distance from the town. When the tropical day drew swiftly to its ending, and the sun sank gorgeous into the sea, when the purple and gold changed to bands of seashell pink and delicate nile green, and the shadows swept up and the stars, gleaming crystals, came out in a sky of velvet, then for me those dead-and-gone slaves, trapped in a web of circumstance, rose from their graves and walked along the shore. Ignorant, toil-worn, insolent, cringing by turns, with all the vices of their unwilling servitude upon them, they cry to high heaven for vengeance. And avenged they have been, for surely Jamaica is the land of wasted opportunities. There is an old house high on the hills above Montego Bay. It is beautifully situated, looking away over the hills and over the lovely bay. It has two-foot thick stone walls built by slave labour, the pillars that uphold the verandah are of solid mahogany--painted white by some Goth--and the windows are heavily shuttered. It is haunted, they say.