Choose death before dishonorable bonds;
Or, fired with vengeance, at the midnight hour
Sudden they seize thine unsuspecting watch,
And thine own poniard bury in thy breast."

All these kinds of negroes, and many others whom it would be tedious to
mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the
vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual
sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque
or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan
fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and
violated their natural affections, with no more pretence of religious
than of temporal consolation, and only capable of substituting one
Fetich for another. The delighted negroes went to mass as to their
favorite _Calenda_; the tawdry garments and detestable drone of the
priest, whose only Catholicism was his indiscriminate viciousness,
appeared to them a superior sorcery; the Host was a great _Gree-gree;_
the muttered liturgy was a palaver with the spirits; music, incense, and
gilding charmed them for a while away from the barbarous ritual of their
midnight serpent-worship. The priests were white men, for the
negroes thought that black baptism would not stick; but they were
fortune-hunters, like the rest of the colony, mere agents of the
official will, and seekers of their pleasures in the huts of the
negro-quarter.[I] The curates declared that the innate stupidity of the
African baffled all their efforts to instil a truth or rectify an error.
The secret practice of serpent-worship was punishable, as the stolen
gatherings for dancing were, because it unfitted them for the next day's
toil, and excited notions of vengeance in their minds. But the curates
declined the trouble of teaching them the difference in spiritual
association between the wafer in a box and the snake in a hamper. On the
whole, the negro loved to thump his sheepskin drum, and work himself
up to the frantic climax of a barbarous chant, better than to hear the
noises in a church. He admired the pomp, but was continually stealing
away to renew the shadowy recollection of some heathen rite. What
elevating influence could there be in the Colonial Church for these
children of Nature, who were annually reinforcing Church and Colony at a
frightful pace with heathenism? Twenty or thirty tribes of pagans were
imported at the rate of twenty thousand living heads per