You give it a cat.' 'But I don't want to poison the cat!' 'Oh, dere a strange cat in a stable; me give it her.' He did so; and the cat was dead in half an hour.
Again the fellow tried, watching when the three white men, as was their custom, should dine together, that he might poison them all.

And again the black servant foiled him, though afraid to accuse him openly.

This time it was--'You no drink a water in a filter.' And when the filter was searched, it was full of poison-leaves.
A third attempt the rascal made with no more success; and then vanished from Sierra Leone; considering--as the Obeah-men in the West Indies are said to hold of the Catholic priests--that 'Buccra Padre's Obeah was too strong for his Obeah.' I know not how true the prevailing belief is, that some of these Obeah-men carry a drop of snake's poison under a sharpened finger- nail, a scratch from which is death.

A similar story was told to Humboldt of a tribe of Indians on the Orinoco; and the thing is possible enough.

One story, which seemingly corroborates it, I heard, so curiously illustrative of Negro manners in Trinidad during the last generation, that I shall give it at length.