Mr Harrison, the Custos of Manchester, tells me that the negro is becoming proud. It is the first step upward. He will not always beg, however great his need. He will not if he can help it acknowledge his poverty. He told me how upon one of his sugar estates he found that for some time the cook he had engaged to cook for the working women, who were supposed to provide the material for breakfast, had nothing to do. The women had no food to be cooked. But they never complained, hungry they quietly went to work. He therefore instructed his “busha” to supply yams or plantains or cocos and coconut oil sufficient for a good breakfast for each woman. They accepted it gratefully, and they did a far better day's work afterwards. This same gentleman told me how the little children are like their parents, becoming proud and self-respecting. They are very poor in that parish where a former wasteful generation has denuded the mountains of trees to grow coffee, and so interfered with the rainfall--but do you think the children are going to acknowledge their poverty? Oh, they have taken their dinners to school, and if you doubt it, they hold up their little tin pails proudly. Not for worlds would they take off the cover and show that inside is that most uninteresting of all foods, cold boiled yam and not, I am afraid, sometimes enough of that. No one will ever taunt such women and children with being servile. Never! As I write this, I come across an extract from an old writer on the negro slave which is worth quoting, the contrast is so great. “Negroes,” he says, “are crafty, artful, plausible, not often grateful for small services, deceitful, overreaching... they are avaricious and selfish, giving all the plague they can to their white rulers, little ashamed of falsehood and even strongly addicted to theft.” But still even he admits “he has some good qualities mingled with his unamiable ones. He is patient, cheerful and commonly submissive, capable at times of grateful attachments where uniformly well treated, and kind and affectionate towards his kindred and offspring.” And he goes on to say how tender are the negro mothers. In fact, even he had to acknowledge that the great bulk of the negroes were beyond the master's observation, and we of later date can see for ourselves that the faults he complains of are not peculiar to negroes, but are the common faults of the slave. As yet, however, the man of African race is often something of a slavish imitator of things European. He struts and boasts of his progress exactly as children do. After all, he has had such a toilsome way to climb since Britain bestowed upon him freedom and poverty, is it to be wondered at if occasionally he has gone a little astray.