umanities, and quite of a classic frame of mind in
his cruelties, bethought himself of a mode of Torture much practised
among the Ancient Persians, and so must needs smear the body of an
unhappy Negro all over with molasses. Then, binding him fast to a stake
in the open, the flies and mosquitoes got at him,--for he was kept there
from one morning until the next,--and he presently gave up the Ghost.
But nothing that I ever saw or heard of during the time of my living in
the Western Indies, could equal the Romantic Torture, not so much
invented as imported, by a Gentleman Merchant who had lived among the
islands of the Grecian Archipelago, and whose jocose humour it was to
imprison his women slaves in loose garments of leather, very tightly
secured, however, at the wrists, neck, and ankles. In the same garments,
before fastening round the limbs of the victim, one or more Infuriated
cats were introduced; the which ferocious animals, playfully disporting
themselves in their attempt to find a point of egress, would so up and
tear, and mangle, and lacerate, with their Terrible claws, the flesh of
the sufferers, that not all the Brine-washing or pepper-pod-rubbing in
the world, afterwards humanely resorted to on their release from their
leathern sepulchre, would save them from mortification. There was a
completeness and gusto about this Performance that always made me think
my Gentleman Merchant from the Greek Islands a very Great Mind. The mere
vulgar imitations of his Process which, in times more Modern, I have
heard of--such as taking an angry cat by the tail and drawing its claws
all abroad down the back of a Negro strapped on to a plank, so making a
map of all the rivers in Tartarus from his neck to his loins--are, in my
holding, beneath contempt. There is positive Genius in that idea of
shutting up the cats in a hide-bound prison, and so letting them work
their own wills on the inner walls; and I hope my Gentleman Merchant has
as warm a niche in Signor Beelzebub's Temple of Fame, as the Great Dutch
Philosopher who first dreamt of the Spanso Bocko.

Before I left the island of Jamaica, there befell me an adventure which
I may briefly narrate. It being the sickly season and very few ships in
port, Maum Buckey's business was somewhat at a stand-still, and with
little difficulty I obtained from her a fortnight's holiday. I might
have spent it with no small pleasure, and even profit, at one of her
up-country plantations, or at