Not two generations ago there might be found, up and down the islands, respectable white men and women who had the same half- belief in the powers of an Obeah-man as our own ancestors, especially in the Highlands and in Devonshire, had in those of witches: while as to poisoning, it was, in some islands, a matter on which the less said the safer.

It was but a few years ago that in a West Indian city an old and faithful free servant, in a family well known to me, astonished her master, on her death-bed, by a voluntary confession of more than a dozen murders.
'You remember such and such a party, when every one was ill?
Well, I put something in the soup.' As another instance; a woman who died respectable, a Christian and a communicant, told this to her clergyman:--She had lived from youth, for many years, happily and faithfully with a white gentleman who considered her as his wife.

She saw him pine away and die from slow poison, administered, she knew, by another woman whom he had wronged.

But she dared not speak.

She had not courage enough to be poisoned herself likewise.
It is easy to conceive the terrorism, and the exactions in the shape of fowls, plantains, rum, and so forth, which are at the command of an Obeah practitioner, who is believed by the Negro to be invulnerable himself, while he is both able and willing to destroy them.