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turesque beauties. At length I reached my estate, 

 jaded and wearied to death \ here I expected to 

 find a perfect paradise, and I found a perfect hell. 

 Report had assured me, that Hordley was the 

 best managed estate in the island, and as far as 

 the soil was concerned, report appeared to have 

 said true ; but my trustee had also assured me, 

 that my negroes were the most contented and 

 best disposed, and here there was a lamentable 

 incorrectness in the account. I found them in a 

 perfect uproar; complaints of all kinds stunned 

 me from all quarters : all the blacks accused all 

 the whites, and all the whites accused all the 

 blacks, and as far as I could make out, both parties 

 were extremely in the right. There was no at- 

 tachment to the soil to be found here ; the negroes 

 declared, one and all, that if I went away and left 

 them to groan under the same system of oppres- 

 sion without appeal or hope of redress, they would 

 follow my carriage and establish themselves at 

 Cornwall. 1 had soon discovered enough to be 

 certain, that although they told me plenty of 

 falsehoods, many of their complaints were but too 

 well founded ; and yet how to protect them for 

 the future or satisfy them for the present was no 

 easy matter to decide. Trusting to these fallacious 

 reports of the Arcadian state of happiness upon 

 Hordley, I supposed, that I should have nothing 

 to do there but grant a few indulgences, and 

 establish the regulations already adopted with 



