ent, from the previous arrangement and disposition of dress, at the
commencement of the entertainment. The girls accordingly came up one
after another to say their Ave Maria, as more consonant to their sex;
but I could scarcely contain my rage when the rascally cow-skin was
applied to them, or my laughter when, smarting under its lash, they
exclaimed, "Benedicta Mulieribus," applying their little hands with
immoderate pressure to the afflicted part.

I could have found in my heart to have wrested the whip out of the hands
of the young negro, and applied it with all my might to him, and his old
villain of a master, and father of these poor children, as I soon found
he was. My patience was _almost_ gone when the second girl received a
lash for her "Plena Gratia." She screamed, and danced, and lifted up
her poor legs in agony, rubbing herself on her "_west_" side, as the
Philadelphia ladies call it, with as much assiduity as if it had been
one of those cases in which friction is prescribed by the faculty.

But the climax was yet to come. A grand stage effect was to be produced
before the falling of the curtain. The youngest girl was so defective
in her lesson that not one word could be extracted from her, even by the
cow-skin; nothing but piercing shrieks, enough to make my heart bleed,
could the poor victim utter. Irritated by the child's want of capacity
to repeat by rote what she could not understand, the old man darted from
his seat, and struck her senseless to the ground.

I could bear no more. My first impulse was to wrest the cow-skin from
the negro's hand, and revenge the poor bleeding child as she lay
motionless on the ground, but a moment's reflection convinced me that
such a step would only have brought down a double weight of punishment
on the victims when I was gone; so, catching up my hat, I turned away
with disgust, and walked slowly towards the town and bay of Port Praya,
reflecting as I went along what pleasant ideas the poor creatures must
entertain of religion, when the name of God and of the cow-skin were
invariably associated in their minds. I began to parody one of Watts's
hymns--

"Lord! how delightful 'tis to see
A whole assembly worship thee."

The indignation I felt against this barbarous and ignorant negro was not
unmingled with some painful recollections of my own younger days, when,
in a Christian and Protestant country, the Bible and Prayer-book had
been made objects of terror