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• They mope, love silence, every friend avoid;
• They inly pine; all aliment reject;
• Or insufficient for nutrition take:
• Their features droop; a sickly yellowish hue
• Their skin deforms; their strength and beauty fly. [375]
• Then comes the feverish fiend, with firy eyes,
• Whom drowth,¹ convulsions, and whom death surround,
• Fatal attendants! if some subtle slave
• (Such, Obia-men are stil’d) do not engage,

• To save the wretch by antidote or spell. [380]

• IN magic spells, in Obia, all the sons
• Of sable Africk trust:—Ye, sacred nine!
• (For ye each hidden preparation know)
• Transpierce the gloom, which ignorance and fraud
• Have render’d awful; tell the laughing world [385]
• Of what these wonder-working charms are made.

blacks imagine that its blow, if not mortal, will at least occasion long and troublesome disorders. A belief in magic is inseparable from human nature, but those nations are most addicted thereto, among whom learning, and of course, philosophy have least obtained. As in all other countries, so in Guinea, the conjurers, as they have more understanding, so are they almost always more wicked than the common herd of their deluded countrymen; and as the negroe-magicians can do mischief, so they can also do good on a plantation, provided they are kept by the white people in proper subordination.

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