SETTLEMENTS ON THE DEMERARY, &C. 339 



I do not know Paramaribo as yet more than cursorily ; 

 although I have some hopes of eventually settling there. It 

 is built on a sand-reef, well arranged, and the streets include 

 beautiful alleys of orange and lemon trees. The houses are of 

 wood, and have no chimnies ; the kitchens, for coolness sake, 

 are detached ; it is a town far advanced in the arts of civilized 

 life, above a mile in length, wide in proportion, and swarm- 

 ing already with an ever-thickening croud of many coloured 

 inhabitants. The population of Paramaribo is estimated at 

 eighteen or twenty thousand persons. Of these, the larger 

 half, at least ten thousand persons, are negro and mulatto slaves. 

 The free people of color are supposed to be about four thou- 

 sand. There are from two to three thousand German and 

 Portuguese jews ; and about eighteen hundred English and 

 Dutch Europeans. The number of temporary residents, as in 

 all sea ports, varies with the season. Paramaribo is the Buenos 

 Ayres of Guyana, the residence of all the native wealth, and 

 the storehouse of what is most curious and precious among 

 the productions of Europe. But in Buenos Ayres the catholic 

 religion is exclusively established, and has splendid cathedrals 

 and pompous processions to exhibit, in which the native In- 

 dians take great delight ; while in Paramaribo, an unlimited 

 toleration prevails, the jew, the catholic, the protestant, the 

 deist, the heathen, visit or neglect at pleasure their respective 

 opportunities of worship, and view with a reciprocal and 

 friendly complacence, the varieties of their traditional observ- 



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