uated on the Black River,
accessible by boats and canoes. The huts of negro slaves were near
the sugar mills, without regard to order, but in clusters of banana,
avocado-pear, limes and oranges, and with the cultivated land round
their huts made an effective picture.

One day every fortnight was allowed the negroes to cultivate their
crops, and give them a chance to manufacture mats for beds, bark-ropes,
wicker-chairs and baskets, earthen jars, pans, and that kind of thing.
The huts themselves were primitive to a degree, the floor being earth,
the roof, of palm-thatch or the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, the sides
hard-posts driven in the ground and interlaced with wattle and plaster,
and inside scarcely high enough for its owner to walk upright. The
furniture was scant--a quatre, or bed, made of a platform of boards,
with a mat and a blanket, some low stools, a small table, an earthen
water-jar, and some smaller ones, a pail and an iron pot, and calabashes
which did duty for plates, dishes and bowls. In one of the two rooms
making the hut, there were always the ashes of the night-fire, without
which negroes could not sleep in comfort.

These were the huts of the lowest grade of negro-slaves of the fields.
The small merchants and the domestics had larger houses with boarded
floors, some even with linen sheets and mosquito nets, and shelves with
plates and dishes of good ware. Every negro received a yearly allowance
of Osnaburgh linen, woollen, baize and checks for clothes, and some
planters also gave them hats and handkerchiefs, knives, needles and
thread, and so on.

Every plantation had a surgeon who received a small sum for attendance
on every slave, while special cases of midwifery, inoculation, etc., had
a particular allowance. The surgeon had to attend to about four hundred
to five hundred negroes, on an income of L150 per annum, and board and
lodging and washing, besides what he made from his practice with the
whites.

Salem was no worse than some other plantations on the island, but it was
far behind such plantations as that owned by Dyck Calhoun, and had been
notorious for the cruelties committed on it. To such an estate a lady
like Sheila Llyn would be a boon. She was not on the place a day before
she started reforms which would turn the plantation into a model scheme.
Houses, food, treatment of the negroes, became at once a study to her,
and her experience in Virginia was invaluable. She had learned there