The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863

districts the number of worthless, idle negroes is much larger. I have been assured that the negroes of the parish of Vere are peculiarly so. The men, I have been told, do scarcely any work, except in crop time; the women do none at all, not even to keep their houses neat. There is scarcely a cottage in the parish that has a bread-fruit or a cocoanut tree on its ground.[3] Everything is dirty and forlorn. On the other hand, in Metcalfe and the adjoining parts of St. Andrew, and St. Thomas in the Vale, although the mass of the working people have certainly not learned much about comfort yet, still the number of neat, floored, and glazed houses, the fruit trees on almost every negro plot, the neat hibiscus hedges, with their gay red flowers, surrounding even the poorer huts, the small cane fields and coffee pieces noticeable at every turn, and the absence of loungers about the cottages, go to make up a very different picture from what has been drawn of Vere. It is plain, then, that the impressions which travel