een a great
blessing to the master; it brought freedom to him as well as to
the slave.

A few days subsequent to our visit to Colonel A.'s, the Reverend Mr.
Packer, of the Established Church, called at our lodgings, and
introduced a planter from the parish of St. Thomas. The planter is
proprietor of an estate, and has eighty apprentices. His apprentices
conduct themselves very satisfactorily, and he had not carried a half
dozen complaints to the special magistrate since 1831. He said that
cases of crime were very rare, as he had opportunity of knowing, being
local magistrate. There were almost no penal offences brought before
him. Many of the apprentices of St. Thomas parish were buying their
freedom, and there were several cases of appraisement[A] every week. The
Monday previous, six cases came before him, in four of which the
apprentices paid the money on the spot.

[Footnote A: When an apprentice signifies his wish to purchase his
freedom, he applies to the magistrate for an appraisement. The
appraisement is made by one special and two local magistrates.]

Before this gentleman left, the Rev. Mr. C. called in with Mr. Pigeot,
another planter, with whom we had a long conversation. Mr. P. has been a
manager for many years. We had heard of him previously as the only
planter in the island who had made an experiment in task work prior to
abolition. He tried it for twenty months before that period on an estate
of four hundred acres and two hundred people. His plan was simply to
give each slave an ordinary day's work for a task; and after that was
performed, the remainder of the time, if any, belonged to the slave. _No
wages were allowed_. The gang were expected to accomplish just as much
as they did before, and to do it as well, however long a time it might
require; and if they could finish in half a day, the other half was
their own, and they might employ it as they saw fit. Mr. P. said, he was
very soon convinced of the good policy of the system; though he had one
of the most unruly gangs of negroes to manage in the whole island. The
results of the experiment he stated to be these:

1. The usual day's work was done generally before the middle of the
afternoon. Sometimes it was completed in five hours.

2. The work was done as well as it was ever done under the old system.
Indeed, the estate continued to improve in cultivation, and presented a
far better appearance at the close of the twenty months than when he
took