POISONING. 137 



tlirongli the West Indies. The existence of this trick of 

 poisoning is denied, often enongh. Sometimes Europeans, 

 willine^ to believe the best of their fellow-men and who shall 

 blame them ? simply disbelieve it because it is unplea- 

 sant to believe. Sometimes, again, white AVest Indians will 

 deny it, and the existence of Obeah beside, simply because 

 they believe in it a little too much, and are afraid of the 

 Negros knowing that they believe in it. I^ot two generations 

 ago there might be found, up and down the islands, respect- 

 able white men and women who had the same half-belief in 

 the powers of an Obeah-man, as our own ancestors, especially 

 in the Highlands and in Devonshire, had in those of witches : 

 while as to poisoning, it was, in some islands, a matter on 

 which the less said the safer. It was but a few years ago 

 that in a West Indian city an old and faithful free ser- 

 vant, in a family weU known to me, astonished her master, 

 on her death-bed, by a voluntary confession of more than a 

 dozen murders. 



" You remember such and such a party, when every one 

 was ill ? Well, I put something in the soup." 



As another instance ; a woman who died respectable, 

 a Christian and a communicant, told this to her clergy- 

 man : She had lived from youth, for many years, happily 

 and faithfully with a white gentleman who considered her as 

 his wife. She saw him pine away and die from slow poison. 



