hey have served their appointed time; so
strengthening ourselves, while we reward a class of men who are far
more respectable, and far more deserving, than most of those on whom
we lavish our philanthropy?

Surely such men would prove as good subjects as old Isaac and his
comrades. For fifty-three years, I was told, he had lived and
worked in Trinidad, always independent; so independent, indeed, that
the very last year, when all but starving, like many of the coloured
people, from the long drought which lasted nearly eighteen months,
he refused all charity, and came down to this very estate to work
for three months in the stifling cane-fields, earning--or fancying
that he earned--his own livelihood. A simple, kindly, brave
Christian man he seemed, and all who knew him spoke of him as such.
The most curious fact, however, which I gleaned from him was his
recollection of his own 'conversion.' His Mary, of whom all spoke
as a woman of a higher intellect than he, had 'been in the Gospel'
several years before him, and used to read and talk to him; but, he
said, without effect. At last he had a severe fever; and when he
fancied himself dying, had a vision. He saw a grating in the floor,
close by his bed, and through it the torments of the lost. Two
souls he remembered specially; one 'like a singed hog,' the other
'all over black like a charcoal spade.' He looked in fear, and
heard a voice cry, 'Behold your sins.' He prayed; promised, if he
recovered, to try and do better: and felt himself forgiven at once.

This was his story, which I have set down word for word; and of
which I can only say, that its imagery is no more gross, its
confusion between the objective and subjective no more
unphilosophical, than the speech on similar matters of many whom we
are taught to call divines, theologians, and saints.

At all events, this crisis in his life produced, according to his
own statement, not merely a religious, but a moral change. He
became a better man henceforth. He had the reputation, among those
who knew him well, of being altogether a good man. If so, it
matters little what cause he assigned for the improvement. Wisdom
is justified of all her children; and, I doubt not, of old black
Isaac among the rest.

In 1864 he had a great sorrow. Old Mary, trying to smoke the
mosquitoes out of her house with a charcoal-pan, set fire, in her
shortsightedness, to the place; and everyth