MAEGON HOG-HUNTERS. 397 



slavery having absorbed him in the general mass 

 of liberated negroes, he has abandoned the hunts- 

 man's life for that of the husbandman. The pursuit 

 of wild hogs has terminated with the rewards for 

 runaway slaves ; and in this age of railways and 

 steam navigation, the flitches of American bacon in 

 the provision shops have driven out of the market 

 the jerked hog of the Maroon. 



" When I applied to our agreeable noter of his- 

 torical facts, Mr. Gregory Johnston, and asked him 

 for characteristic accounts of hog-hunting and hog- 

 hunters in the glens of Portland, where the Maroons 

 still had settlements, I inquired of him whether the 

 lairs of our forest breed exhibited what is a com- 

 mon habit of the wild hog in Europe, — the female 

 covering her companion with litter, and after com- 

 fortably putting him to bed, slipping under the cover 

 herself, and lying with him entirely concealed. I 

 thought if this pretty trait of forest housewifery 

 existed, the Maroons must have surprised them fre- 

 quently in their connubial coziness. He promised 

 me a graphic accovmt of what he had learnt from a 

 veteran hunter, but he did not live to write it out 

 for me, though he had certainly jotted it down. His 

 intelligent son, who was as enthusiastic a lover of 

 woodland sports as his father, and to whom we are 

 indebted for traits of the Gowries*, hardly outlived 

 him. He perished accidentally : his gun went ofi" 

 and wounded him while shooting in the woods. I 

 might otherwise have got his father's notes from 

 him. 



* See ' The Birds of Jamaica/ p. 58. 



