“She is going to die,” she said. “She does not care to live.” It appears she had lived with some white man who had been fond of her as he passed by, and she had given him her whole soul. Then came the inevitable, the time when he departed for Accra, and Adjuah was distracted. She could not believe he had left her for ever, and she, too, started along the coast for the distant town. Like many another loving woman she felt if he could only see her all would be well. But barely a day's journey along the coast came the great Prah river, and it passed her powers to cross it. She waited there for days, and then, reluctantly, all along the burning sands she crawled back wearily to the shelter of the woman she knew would care for her, and there she waited listlessly--to die. Is that what happened to these little girls flaunting it so proudly in their silken clothes? Indeed, worse things might happen to them. Possibly they were sold as slaves; most surely their children were, for it is said in Jamaica that every overseer and book-keeper took a mistress from among the slaves, a girl who came to him gladly for the betterment of her lot, but she knew and he knew that their children must be born into servitude, and the father, when the time came for him to go, left them as lightly as he would so many cattle. Spear, in his book on the American slave trade, tells how, in the days when the trade was being suppressed, the British warship _Medina_, on boarding a slaver off the Gallinas River, found no slaves on board. “The officers learned afterwards, however, that her captain really had had a mulatto girl in the cabin. He kept her for some time after the cruiser appeared, but seeing that he was to be boarded, and knowing that the presence of one slave was enough to condemn the ship, he tied her to a kedge anchor and dropped her into the sea. And so, as is believed, he drowned his own unborn flesh and blood, as well as the slave girl.” Think of the state of public opinion when a whole crew could stand calmly by, or even give a hand to perpetrate such an atrocious deed. Is it any wonder that, on any land where was such slavery as this, there seems to have fallen a curse; less favoured lands have flourished, but gorgeous tropical countries, where vegetation runs riot, have not kept abreast in the race. Surely those unconscious little girls, unconscious of their own woes, sometimes the pampered slave, bound to be the out-cast slave in the end, have brought a curse upon them. It broods over Africa. It is here in Jamaica, it will take much wisdom and many many years to work it off. Of course it was not only the women who suffered. Slavery was the custom of the time, and men and women alike were chattels. It was the pitiful pretence to place and power that makes us feel more keenly the case of these little girls who were wives and yet no wives, and gained honour for a brief season by being associated with the white men.