He was a middle-sized Negro, in cast of features not above the average, and Isaac by name.

He told me how he had been born in Baltimore, a slave to a Quaker master; how he and his wife Mary, during the second American war, ran away, and after hiding three days in the bush, got on board a British ship of war, and so became free.

He then enlisted into one of the East Indian regiments, and served some years; as a reward for which he had given him his five acres of land in Trinidad, like others of his corps.

These Negro yeomen-veterans, let it be said in passing, are among the ablest and steadiest of the coloured population.

Military service has given them just enough of those habits of obedience of which slavery gives too much--if the obedience of a mere slave, depending not on the independent will, but on brute fear, is to be called obedience at all.
Would that in this respect, as in some others, the white subject of the British crown were as well off as the black one.