Lack: or Larental Feeling. 
51 
185. A newcomer, and as yet unacquainted with the character of the 
negro, I at first felt pity for the poor devils at these procedures of the 
police which really seemed to be more than tyrannical, since they were 
being treated not as human beings but like refractory brutes. Still more 
did my finer feelings revolt at seeing the sweet-scented frail and delicate- 
ly-smiling English women and Creoles regard these terrible scenes of 
ill-treatment with such indifference as if they were daily familiarised 
with them: — which certainly is the case. But I was forced only too soon 
to the absolute conviction that by such measures alone could the negro 
be controlled, and that he would be able to live just as much without food 
and drink as without whacking. One's compassion is lost on becoming 
more intimate with his character and principles. 
186. As our house was for the most part surrounded by negro quar- 
ters and the building at the back was likewise occupied by them, Sunday 
always proved a holiday for me, for from the gallery I was then able 
to look down on my neighbours, whom on a week-day I would: readily 
keep three paces away from, and see them hurrying off to church in white 
silk or muslin garments, as sweet-scented as rose or jasmine stocks, 
though, for an hour beforehand they would be watching the weather with 
their smouldering stumpy clay pipes in their mouths. This was the 
funny side of our building: though its yard almost daily provided scenes 
where the parents, not like human beings, let alone of the same flesh and 
blood, punished their children in a way that precludes them being treat- 
ed as men and women themselves. How often did the howl of woe, the 
crying and whimpering of the youngster writhing under the blows of its 
inhuman mother or pitiless father call me to the window : How often did 
I draw back with closed eyes and stuffed, ears on seeing one of the furies 
tearing the clothes from off her boy or girl in heedless frenzy, seize it by 
the hair, throw it on the floor, and then like an enraged beast stamp 
upon the writhing and groaning child — or when, after tying hands and 
feet she hung it up and, raving, foaming, and yelling, let out with a 
three or four strand rope, not worrying where the blows fell, till blood 
flowed from the wounds, mouth and nose. Still more brutal are the 
fights and matrimonial disputes between man and wife, or between two 
jealous female rivals. Teeth and nails are here the ultima ratio, and I 
have seen fights taking place below my window where, on one occasion 
the two contending devils had bitten into one another like raving bull- 
dogs, and could only be parted by each one retaining in her bloody mouth 
a piece of the other’s flesh while, on another, the daughter had bitten 
off her mother’s forefinger, the latter reciprocating with a snap from off 
her daughter’s breast. 
187. If the negro’s bare appearance by itself alone fails to exert quite 
the most favourable impression upon the newly-arrived European, it 
becomes really horrible when afflicted with one ol those innumerable 
loathsome diseases to which he is far more subject than any other inhab- 
itant of Gniana. Among these are specially “Yaws," Fvambosia, and 
“Barbados Leg,” all of them varieties of Elephantiasis where the whole 
body is covered completely with yellow ulcers that are considered just 
as contagious as syphilitic sores, but reckoned incurable. Elephantiasis 
