All authorities agree that these bondservants were cruelly ill-used. It was generally understood that while a man looked after his black slave, who was his for life, it was to his interest to get as much as he could out of his bondservant whose services were his only for a limited period. Thus it was that they were worked very hard indeed, so hard that often in sheer self-defence when the end of his time was approaching, a man would prevail upon his master to re-sell him for a further term of years to some other man. And often the servant died before the years were passed. I have found no record of what a woman brought, but I expect that Madam often commissioned her husband to bring her a quiet, middle-aged woman, not too good looking--though she probably didn't put it quite in those words--to tend the children and do the sewing. And the younger men, I expect, looked at the girls and suggested the propriety of a new waiting-maid to their fathers, or possibly, if they had houses of their own, bought them themselves. Oh, I can see bitter depths of degradation that lay in wait for some of those younger bondwomen. One might think, considering how valuable was the worker, it would have been easy to escape and work as a free labourer. But the authorities had provided for that. At the expiration of his time his master had to give the servant £2 and a certificate of freedom, and whoever employed any free person without a certificate from the last employer forfeited £10. Who then would take any risk when for so little more he could have a servant of right? Each servant was to receive yearly three shirts, three pairs of drawers, three pairs of shoes, three pairs of stockings, and one hat or cap, little enough in a climate like Jamaica where the need is for plenty of clothes, washed often. The women were supplied proportionately. As a matter of fact the men often had no shoes, and were dressed, says Lesley, in a speckled shirt, a coarse Osnaburg frock (Osnaburg seems to have been a coarse sort of linen, something, I take it, like the dowlas of which we make kitchen towels), buttoned at the neck and wrists, and long trousers of the same, and they had bare feet unless they could contrive sandals. The women wore generally a striped Holland gown with a plain cloth wrapped about their heads, such as every negro maid wears nowadays.