“In my drive this morning met several of the unfortunate half black progeny of some of our staff,” writes Lady Nugent, “all in fine muslin lace, &c., with wreaths of flowers in their hats. What ruin for these worse than thoughtless, young men.” If she wrote thus, she probably did not refrain from comment at the time, and doubtless her comment was resented. “Soon after my arrival,” writes Matthew Lewis, “I asked my attorney” (an attorney in Jamaica is the man who manages the estate for an absentee owner) “whether a clever-looking woman who seemed to have great authority in the house belonged to me.” “'No, she was a free woman.' “'Was she in my service then?' “'No, she was not in my service; I began to grow impatient. “'But what does she do at Cornwall? Of what use is she in the house?' “'Why, sir, as to use, of great use, sir'; and then, after a pause, added in a lower voice, 'It is the custom, sir, for unmarried men to have housekeepers, and Nancy is mine.'” Lewis wrote in the second decade of the nineteenth century a little after Lady Nugent, and putting all these little stories together, we get a complete picture of the Jamaican estate as it must have been for close on two hundred years. The black people, naked at first and later clad in rags, lived in a little village some distance from the Great House where dwelt their master, and the bond between them was the woman he took from amongst them for his convenience. The villages were of palm-thatched houses with walls of swish or of wattle, and were very often surrounded by a wall, for if the owner valued his privacy so did the dweller in the village, and presently around them grew up a grove of trees planted by the negro sometimes by design, sometimes by accident; there were coconut palms and naseberries, tall leafy trees, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks to Bligh and Marshall, breadfruit and mango trees, the handsomest trees, perhaps, that bear fruit, and there were oranges and lemons with their fragrant blossoms.