MAROON 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 account 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 off 
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. 
