SAN FERNANDO. 31 



iiig little town, which was, when we took the island in 1795, 

 only a group of huts. In it I noted only one thing which 

 looked unpleasant. The ISTegro houses, however roomy and 

 comfortable, and however rich the gardens which surrounded 

 them, were mostly patched together out of the most hetero- 

 geneous and wretched scraps of wood ; and on inquiry I found 

 that the materials were, in most cases, stolen ; that when a 

 ISTegro wanted to build a house, instead of buying the mate- 

 rials, he pilfered a board here, a stick there, a nail somewhere 

 else, a lock or a clamp in a fourth place, about the sugar 

 estates, regardless of the serious injury which he caused to 

 working buildings ; and when he had gathered a sufficient 

 pile, hidden safely away behind his neighbour's house, the 

 new hut rose as if by magic. This continual pilfering, I was 

 assured, was a serious tax on the cultivation of the estates 

 around. But I was told, too, frankly enough, by the very 

 gentleman who complained, that this habit was simply an 

 heirloom from the bad days of slavery, when the pilfering of 

 the slaves from other estates was connived at by their own 

 masters, on the ground that if A's Xegros robbed B, B's 

 Negros robbed C, and so all round the alphabet ; one more 

 evil instance of the demoralizing effect of a state of things 

 which, wrong in itself, was sure to be the parent of a hundred 

 other wrongs. 



Being, happily for me, in the Governor's suite, I had oppor- 



