Dorinda came home from church. She had on a neat, blue cotton dress, a snow-white handkerchief was wrapped round her head, her pretty black feet were bare, and her comely dark face stood clear cut in the evening light against the white wall of the house.

“What church do you belong to, Dorinda?”

“Baptist, missus.” So she was one of the Black Family, the church that bravely tried first to teach the slaves.

“And have you been baptised?”

“No, missus. I’m an enquirer.” It troubled her mistress a little that Dorinda often felt the strong need to “enquire” sometime, when the table should be laid or the silver cleaned.

But an “enquirer” exactly represents my attitude towards Jamaica. I’m an enquirer still, though I lived there for over eighteen months, and every day I learned something. Indeed, much to my surprise, I find I sometimes appear to know a great deal more than many of the people who have lived there all their lives. It reminds me of an American tourist I met once at the Myrtle Bank, Jamaica’s principal hotel—“My dear,” she said, “I’ve been a great traveller of late, and I’m just full up of information, mostly wrong.”

Still, there are some things I can see for myself. They are forced upon me like a slap in the face. Kingston was a disappointment. It is a dust-heap, somewhat ill-kept; there is none of the lush luxuriance of the tropics one expects from its latitude. Out of Kingston—in it too for that matter—it is very difficult for those not blessed with a superfluity of this world’s goods to live in Jamaica comfortably, simply and inexpensively; the mosquitoes are a nuisance, the ticks run them a very good second, and the post office facilities are the very worst in the world.

Having relieved my mind of my objections to the country, I may say I have found it a lovely land, its people as hospitable and kind as its post office is bad—which is saying a good deal—and I enjoyed my stay there so much that I wanted to settle there.

When I first landed, it struck me the country was black, and then I learned its nationality.

“What countrywoman are you, Frances?” I asked the lady who condescended to destroy my clothes under the pretence of washing them. Frances grinned all over her black face—well, not exactly black but mahogany red, with a skin so fine the greatest lady in the land might envy her.

“Me, missus, me British, missus.” And British she and her like are for weal or woe. Strongly against their wills Britain forced her nationality upon their fathers, and now they are as loyal sons and daughters of the Empire as are to be found under the union Jack. Woe be to Britain if she does not treat these her children well.

There came into the harbour at Kingston, the lovely harbour which is not half appreciated, a warship with the Stars and Stripes at her peak, and the black men in the streets and all along the harbour shores looked on with the greatest interest, More than one man took off the ugly tourist cap with the deep peak which seems a speciality of Jamaica, and scratched his wool thoughtfully and then one was found to voice the thoughts of the rest.

“Ah!” said he, “but wait till our Temeraire comes along.” It is I who emphasise the “our,” not they. To them it seems quite natural. She is theirs. And truly I think this people have bought their nationality with their blood if ever people have. Kingston is full of these Britons.

At first I was inclined to grumble because the houses all seemed in need of paint, all looked dusty and untidy, and all wanted mending in places, all the gardens needed water, in fact, but for the saving grace of the Myrtle Bank Hotel, I should have damned Kingston utterly. But I took the Psalmist’s advice and lifted my eyes to the hills, and I saw what a lovely world was this to which I had come. There was a harbour, a harbour that will hold a fleet, a great sheet of blue water sparkling in the sunshine, fringed all round with the riotous green of the tropics, and behind were the Blue Mountains, a glorious setting for man’s untidy handiwork. There is range upon range of hills, their peaks clean-cut against the blue sky, with little cloudlets nestling in their folds, and dark blue shadows marking the deeper gullies. A splendid range of mountains they would be in any land, but here they are close, close so that any man may leave the hot and dusty street and may rest in their gullies, with the refreshing smell of damp earth and dewy vegetation in his nostrils.

This is a marked characteristic, one of the great charms of Jamaica. Nowhere in the world that I have been, have I found in a small area so many points of vantage from which may be seen beautiful views. Again and again have I climbed—nay, usually a motor or a buggy carried me—to a hilltop or a hillside, and there stretching below me was the sea, the ever changing sea, while around were range after range of hills with the cloud shadows resting upon them. There are broadleaved banana plantations on their slopes, the villages are embedded in mango and bread-fruit trees, the vivid green of sugar plantations is in the rich bottoms, a house here and there gives life to the scene, but the rugged rocks, crowned by tall trees, are the same Columbus saw. Here a symmetrical broad leaf stands out clear against the blue sky, every branch outlined, and here mahogany, mahoe, and the giant cotton tree, cedar and sweet-wood and a dozen other trees grow close together, close and tall, struggling up to the sunshine, marking by their stature and their girth the wealth of the soil that has given them birth.

Sometimes, often indeed, a tropical storm sweeps over these hills, for nowhere in the island is the rainfall less than 30 inches in the year, and in many places in the mountains that amount falls in a month, and anyone who has the temerity to be out in the downpour has a great broad banana leaf on his head and over the bundle he is carrying.

I have never seen a country that seemed so primeval and yet was so well populated, for we must admit that close on a million people in an island, a little larger than half the size of Wales, makes for fairly close habitation, and in the remoter corners far away from civilisation as distance goes in the island, there are everywhere small shacks where dwell the country folk. When the shacks are very far from the main road, I know that the owner is an ill-used man, for the Jamaican peasant likes company. His idea of bliss is to have a house right on the road, where he can converse with all and sundry who pass by, and keep in touch with the life of the island. He would not give a “thank you” for permission to live in the empty Great House on the hill above.

And that is another curious condition of Jamaica, the number of Great Houses empty and going fast to decay. I have seen some, like “Stonehenge,” just a heap of rubble, and others like the Hyde, that except for a day or two once every six weeks are entirely given over to the bats and the rats, and the other pests of Jamaica. Really quite a large number of the New Poor of England could be comfortably housed in the empty Great Houses of Jamaica. Well, perhaps that is a forgivable exaggeration. But Jamaica is like England, the majority of people cannot afford to live in her Great Houses built for the days when there were servants and slaves a-plenty, and there was no thought of modern improvements.

The Jamaican negro usually does not have his plantation round his home. As in the old slave days he has it at some distance away, often so far that he must needs stay there at night to guard it. The idea, I believe, is that he saves the land round his home for the time when his legs shall be too old to carry him to a great distance. Still, round the shack itself may often be seen the poles supporting the green vines of yams, and often there is a breadfruit tree, its leafy arms stretching out hospitably, its handsome leaves glimmering and glinting in the sunshine, and in the season when it is well grown its fruit will support a village. He probably also has a few bananas or plantains, and there is sometimes a primitive mill, with a blindfolded mule going slowly round and round, crushing the cane for the coarse head sugar that the black man loves. There are some hens scratching happily, for there is plenty for a hen to eat, a goat or two is tethered on a patch of grass, for the children want milk, and there is a pig, the only animal the negro feels bound to feed. He grows yams and corn and cocos for his hog, but his poor mongrel dog is so starved as a rule (I have seen brilliant exceptions), it makes your heart ache.

When we lived at the Hyde, the mongrel dogs belonging to the “Busha” and some of the labourers were the plague of our lives. They were always ranging the place in search of scraps. On one occasion we did remonstrate as forcibly as we dared with a black man who owned an unfortunate starving puppy whose bones stood out of its skin, and the next day the poor brute arrived, starved as ever, with a bleeding stump where its tail should have been. On its heels came its angry master. And we were also angry.

“I dun all me can, missus,” he explained. “He will come. Me cut off him tail an’ burry him an’ tie him on top. It sure ting him stay wid him tail but him bruck de ‘tring.”

Poor things! Poor things! The sufferings of the dogs and indeed of all animals in Jamaica at the hands of unthinking black men!

A self-contained establishment is the Jamaican shack. Sometimes it is built of wattle, as the huts to-day are built on the Gambia, whence came the Mandingo slaves, sometimes mud is daubed on the wattle, as it is on the Gold Coast, sometimes it is built of rough logs and it is thatched with palm leaves, or, as the family rises in the social scale, with shingle. In it apparently dwell a large family, ranging from the old granny whose age no man knoweth, to the new-born baby of her great grand-daughter, a baby born into a new world where life I know will be easier for it and hold more advantages than it did for the old woman who sits nodding in the shade. Perhaps the hut belongs to her. It often seemed to me that the hut did belong to the women, even as they do in the country from which they came.

All the cultivator, man or woman, need buy is the scanty household furnishing, and a very limited supply of clothing for the elders and the younger children. The older boys and girls soon learn to provide for themselves. It is quite easy to live off the land, and if more money is wanted there is always a cattle pen or a sugar estate handy where wages can be earned. When the emancipation came, the angry planter declared he wanted no idle vagabonds upon his estate, and did his best to break up the old slave villages. Now as the manager of a sugar estate told me he likes to have his labour close, and he at least was encouraging the negroes once more to build upon his plantation. Not that the negro works very hard as yet. The hard-working toiler of the north would be surprised at the easy-going ways of these children of the sun. A man will work I am told four days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, but he has his wages on Friday night, so he does no work on Saturday, it is market day. Sunday of course is a day of rest, everyone knows it would be wicked to work on Sunday, and Monday is banana day—the day when the bananas are taken down to the port. All the roads down from the mountains, the roads that those in authority have decreed shall be as far as is possible without shade, are lined with people mostly women and girls bearing on their heads great bunches of green bananas, which are sold to the fruit companies or at their collecting depots about the country. A fruitful land! It strikes me forcibly, for I am fresh from reading the wails of the slave owners—“the negroes will not increase.” Will any wild things kept in captivity increase? But put those same wild things in suitable environment. Miss Maxwell Hall has a story about this increase.

She interested herself to get a pen boy of hers into one of the contingents going to the war. He wanted to serve the Empire—his Empire. He was a stalwart young fellow, but enquiries had to be made about those dependent upon him. Then she found that he was the father of eleven children, five by one woman and six by two other women! They were all alive and there was every probability of more! He had already served the Empire so well that the Government felt he had better stay at home and see to the proper upbringing of the hostages he had given to fortune.

No wonder there are thronged roads, but there should be more cultivated patches. The cultivation should be like that of Provence, for this is a fruitful country, although people talk of its being so poor. Miss Maxwell Hall, that most capable young pen-keeper, says—“For years everyone has been engaged in taking money out of Jamaica. No one ever seems to have thought of putting money into the land, of working the country for itself.” Exactly what Madden said ninety years before.

Does this explain the desolate looking towns set amidst such fertile lands? There are poor. I saw them every day, but why they are so poor I do not know. All the civilised world is crying out for just such small products as the negro can supply, cold storage is the order of the day, why then are there any poor in Jamaica? Possibly a discreet knowledge of the growing powers of the soil is lacking, and also there is no doubt manual labour is despised.

With whip and chain the white man taught the black—drove the thought into him with the branding iron—that manual labour was a despicable thing, something only to be undertaken by those who could do no better, and we cannot undo that teaching in a few years. Indeed it is only in the last few years, only since the cruel war which has made us all so wise, that Britain herself learned the lesson.

I have always been keenly interested in openings for women, and inclined to be wrathful when other women talk as if matrimony were the only career for a woman. Of course matrimony is good for a woman, exactly as it is for a man, but I have always felt strongly that it is for the nation’s good that every woman should go down into the arena and work for her living as a man does. If she marry—well—she will know better how to bring up her own sons and daughters, and if she do not marry—also well. She will have made a place for herself in the world, and can hold up her head as a valuable citizen.

Feeling this strongly, it is no wonder that one of the most interesting happenings of my stay in Jamaica was my coming upon Charlotte Maxwell Hall, a young woman who is entering upon a career I should have loved at her age. She is young, extremely good looking, if she will allow me to say so, charming, and, above all, she is strenuous and vivid with energy—indomitable. She is the Government Meteorologist, and she is managing the cattle pen which her father bought forty years ago, long before she was born. She lives up at Kempshot, on top of the highest hill for miles round, which has one of the loveliest views in lovely Jamaica, and she is gradually working that 600 acres of rough hill country into a beautiful park, where the pastures are walled by stone walls as they are in Derbyshire or Northern China, walls built from the stones picked off the pastures, which must be put somewhere. She looks after her trees. She prunes; why should not shelter trees be kept beautifully, says she, and she takes every opportunity of planting trees from other lands. And as for her cattle, they are tended under her own eyes, and she wages unceasing war against that plague of Jamaica, the tick.

For the acquaintance—the friendship I think I may write now—of this young lady, I am indebted to my cook Malvina. We had left the Hyde and gone to live at Montego Bay, and the family wanted milk, wanted it rather badly, as Samuel Hyde Parsons, “young massa up at Hyde,” was but a small person and milk is a precious commodity in Montego Bay. Many people got it out of a tin. We did at first. And Malvina suggested—“Why not missus writing to Miss Maxwell Hall? Miss Maxwell Hall kindly supplying.”

I didn’t know whether the lady would be “kindly supplying” or not, but I thought the offer of cash down might induce her to do so.

And my letter brought me a visit from a laughing girl in a motor, who said she did sell milk, rather to the horror of some of her relations who felt that the most she ought to do was to “oblige a few friends.” She, finding her milk going to waste, had advanced a step further and did not see why she should not oblige herself, and had set to work putting that milk-walk upon a business basis.

And there and then on the verandah looking out over the sea, we struck up a friendship based on my unbounded admiration for her and her work. Presently I was looking for a house without being able to find one that suited my needs, and she came to my rescue with an invitation to the three of us, myself, Eva and the baby, to go to Kempshot Pen.

And there I saw a side of life which gave me not only great hopes of Jamaica, but for all the tropical possessions of Britain. Here was a place run—by a woman, a young woman—and run frankly for gain and for the good of all the people surrounding it.

Charlotte Maxwell Hall is Jamaican born (of English parents) and she loves her home, and she is making a beginning of a new phase in that land. What she is doing to the surprise of her generation, the next generation will be keen on doing and they will regenerate Jamaica.

Not that there are not rich pens and well kept pens, but they are managed by men and they are much greater in extent.

Kempshot specially attracted me because it was run by a young woman of an age when many girls are thinking only of their amusement, run not only with the intention of getting every ounce of good out of the soil, but of putting back into that soil all the good that came out out of it. And the place where she earns her livelihood, the place where the slaves rose and ninety years ago drove Major Hall and his wife fleeing in the night down through the jungle for their very lives, bids fair to be a very jewel among homesteads, a model for all Jamaican homesteads. I only trust the loneliness of it will not drive her away. And then, of course, with a woman, and an attractive one, there is always the danger that some man may persuade her to marry him and he will carry her off.

Oh, but some of those ladies Madden talks about, “accustomed to all the refinements of English society,” would turn in their graves if they could see this their modern representative. She will be still in her youth when her years make her old enough to be the mother of the girls of his time. But then she arises long before dawn, she is riding or walking in boots and breeches, dogs at her heels, over the pen seeking with the eye of the master for defects as soon as the first glimmer of light comes over the mountains; she rests in the middle of the day, but her work is hardly done when the sun sinks gorgeously to rest behind the tree-topped hills in the west.

And she has her work cut out for her. For the negro, whether on her estate or, what is worse, on its borders, is intolerably wasteful of his property and other people’s. For instance, she found on the land when it came into her hands two well-grown handsome trees which she discovered were mahogany trees. She hailed them with delight and gave them every attention. And then one day to her dismay she found her precious trees, trees nearly as old as herself, dying and past all hope, for some negro outside her boundaries had stripped the bark off them, because mahogany bark—and mahogany bark is difficult to get now in accessible places—makes the best floor stain! That is the sort of difficulty the man or woman who would do well by the country has to encounter in Jamaica. It takes the heart out of the worker. What was the good of storming and raging, the seventeen year old mahogany trees were dead, because a negro wanted to earn without trouble a few pence in Montego Bay. Again and again going the rounds, Miss Maxwell Hall finds that the black people have ruthlessly cut down trees she is cherishing, cut them down for firewood, or to make shingles, or for a riding-whip or some other trifle.

In my experience the negro peasant makes a very wasteful agriculturist. Sir Hugh Clifford I see, speaking of the countries from which the forbears of the coloured Jamaican came, advocates that white men be not encouraged to settle in these lands, that they be left to the peasants.

I see what he means. He deprecates the arrival of the white man, who comes as a bird of passage, anxious to take all he can out of the land before retiring after a certain number of years to enjoy his spoils—a well-earned, peaceful old age he would call it, an old age beginning somewhere about forty—in the country of his birth.

The countries that go to make up the Empire should not be so treated. But I cannot think that the peasant on the soil is best left alone to work out his own salvation. He will work it out I suppose in time, but the cost will be heavy. I have watched the peasant in the Alpes Maritimes in France, I have seen the fishermen drawing their nets in the Italian Riviera, and I have seen the negro in Jamaica and West Africa, and I unhesitatingly say that the cost of that working out is very heavy indeed.

The fishermen complained bitterly—there are no more fish, only the little young ones, but they went on fishing relentlessly, taking every one, destroying those that were so small they fell through the fine meshes of the net on to the beach.

“Oh, they take all,” said a man looking on who spoke a little French, and he laughed.

In Jamaica the peasant is a very wasteful, a ruinous agriculturist, the only thing he does not waste is his own health and energy. In West Africa the same accusation held good. The peasant ruthlessly burnt down the forest trees to make a place for his patch of food-stuffs, and when the land was worn out there he chose another spot and repeated the destruction. He does the same in Jamaica.

In France it is the other way. The country is carefully tilled. The hillsides that would be barren anywhere else are blooming gardens, but the working out bears cruelly on the individual, especially on the women. Look at the people, white people all, industrious, thrifty, admirable in many ways—and about as far advanced in civilisation as they were at the end of the eighteenth century! Their women are worn with toil, they are haggard and old, toothless crones, before they are thirty. All the joy and loveliness has gone out of their life. Up in the mountains they are devout enough, but they have no use for modern science, and as I saw them they are not as far advanced as many a negro I have met in Jamaica, even as the negroes are far behind the farmers of Australia and New Zealand.

Now I am sure that most people will agree with me that the capable business man—and in “man” I include the capable of both sexes—the man with modern knowledge and training, the farseeing man who will settle in a country and give it the best of his years, will educate and help the peasant to get the most out of the land and better his lot, who will bring up his children to follow in his footsteps, must be a boon in any land. The ignorant peasant wastes; in France his labour and strength in archaic methods of labour and life, in Jamaica and West Africa he wastes the timber, he wastes the animals he has under him, he wastes the soil, the earth brings forth not one-tenth of what it might under more enlightened rule.

And I need not say what that increase would mean, not only to the peasant but to a great manufacturing country like Great Britain.

When I read about Garden Cities in England, and the necessity for women emigrating, I am full of wonder why someone with a little money does not start an agricultural colony in Jamaica. I can see no reason why the beautiful land should become the exclusive property of the rich fleeing from the northern winter. It should be an ideal place for people who are not rich, especially for women. Here is eternal summer, here are beautiful surroundings, here is a fertile soil crying out for cultivation, here is a large peasant population waiting for employment, here is an ample fruit supply, here should be milk and eggs and chickens in abundance; here is no need of fires and furs, of winter clothing, of carpets and curtains, of heavy bedding.

If a woman go to Canada or Australia she must use her hands—it will do her no harm, but many women do not like the prospect—but in Jamaica for many a long day to come there will be labour in plenty crying out for a guiding hand. All it seems to me that is required to make such settlements a great success is a little money—you cannot have land and plan to work it for nothing anywhere—a little common sense, and they would be a boon not only to Jamaica but to the Empire. Only one thing, two things, perhaps, I would insist on. All the windows must be built as are those in the south of France and in Italy—like doors that open wide and let in an abundance of air, and not as they make them in Jamaica, sash fashion, after the custom of cold England. And no settler must live in a mosquito-proof room. He must clear away the mosquitoes.

They talk about the Jamaican negro as dishonest, but I think that is to be attributed to ignorance, and will mend with better wages and better education. My servants, low as were their wages, might have been trusted as a rule with my money or my jewellery or even my clothes, and they only pilfered the flour and sugar and such like commodities which, considering they fed themselves and these things were dear, was putting their sins on a par with that of the boy who steals sugar or apples; but there is a form of larceny in Jamaica which is very crippling to industry, and which I have not heard of in any other land. The Jamaican peasant cannot for the life of him help predial larceny, that is field larceny. He steals not only from the well-to-do man with a large acreage, but from his neighbour and his friend. Before the yams are ready for digging, or the corn ready to be cut, comes along the predial thief and relieves the owner of a large portion of his crop. Whenever any man plants he must put in enough to supply the greedy robber, who is too lazy to plant for himself. Everyone expects part of his crop to be taken. It is the curse of the country.

“Missus,” said a black boy to Miss Maxwell Hall, “you buy my corn when him ripe?”

“Have you any corn, Cyril?” He rejoiced in that high-sounding name.

“Got good big plot, missus. Him ripe soon.”

“Very well,” she said good-naturedly, anxious to help on the industrious, and passing over the fact that he had calmly taken her land without paying any rent. So the time went on and the fowls wanted food.

“Where’s that corn, Cyril?”

“Oh, missus!” sighed Cyril, sad, but not surprised, “somebody tief him all.”

And his was the common lot.

Near one of the big towns there was a man who, having a crop of roots from which he expected great things, took the trouble to sit up and watch by night with a shot-gun in his hand. He concealed himself, of course, and in the uncertain light of the early morning he saw a big figure stooping over his precious roots, and, aiming low, let fly. The dark figure scuffled away promptly, and the owner of the land was satisfied, because when the daylight came he found blood on the ground.

“Now,” he said to himself, “when I hear some man got sick in de laigs den I know who tief my yams.”

For a day or two nothing happened, and then it began to be rumoured that a well-known man, a man in quite a decent position in the community, had a curious swelling in his legs.

“No can put foot to groun’,” and the owner of the yams smiled.

The sick man went to the hospital at last, though he stood off as long as he could, and those inconsiderate doctors, instead of applying the proper remedies, insisted upon enquiring into the cause of the trouble, which he felt was no business of theirs.

“What were you doing?” asked the inquisitive leeches.

“Cuttin’ bush,” said the patient ruefully, “an’ me fall backwards into makra with bad thorn,” and further investigation revealed the fact that at the bottom of every makra thorn wound there was a large pellet such as would come out of a shot-gun!

But the patient insisted he had not been shot. He didn’t want to be arrested for larceny! But everybody about the place then knew that this well-to-do man had paid a night visit to his poorer neighbour’s yam patch!

What the remedy for this evil is going to be I don’t know. Of course everyone must see the cause. The curse of slavery that hung over the land for 250 years destroys every shred of selfrespect. I put it to you, can a slave have any self-respect, a man who is not responsible for his own doings. He took everything he could get, honestly or dishonestly, he was fraudulently held himself, what did it matter to him whose property he took so long as he kept his back from the lash. And a standard of life that has been inculcated for so long is not likely to be altered in three generations, especially when for the greater part of that time these people have been most distressingly poor.

I like the black man of Jamaica. No one can help liking him, and still more do I like the black woman, with her smiling face and her strong desire to please. But even in this strong desire to please I trace the mark of that cruel bondage that held the people for so long. Ask a peasant man or woman a simple question, how far, for instance, is a certain place, and he will not tell you the truth, though he may have walked the distance every day of his life, and if he does not know it in terms of miles, has a very good idea of how long it will take you to reach it, and could tell you if he pleased. But no, he tries to find out how far you wish it to be, and that distance it is. Ask about the weather, and if you show you wish for rain your peasant predicts rain, even as he is sure it is going to be fine if you want fine weather. Still at heart he is a slave, dependent in a measure on the kindliness of those above him for all he wants.

But dishonesty is not inborn in the Jamaican peasant. At the Myrtle Bank Hotel, where the servants are not only well paid but get good tips from the guests, the maids are so rigidly honest that the very pins and hairpins I dropped on the floor were picked up and placed on my dressing-table.

It was a significant fact. They were no longer slaves, they were self-respecting men and women—even as you or I. Their very tongue had altered. They spoke excellent English, spoke in soft and pleasant voices, to which it was a pleasure to listen. Most of the negroes have naturally pleasant tones, educated, they are delightful so long as the speaker does not think about himself and become pompous and bombastic.

They tell me there is no discontent among the well-paid employees of the United Fruit Company, that they do their work cheerfully and well, and I have seen for myself happy, honest, well-spoken house servants. I once stayed in a house, that of the Hon. A. Harrison, custos of Manchester. I was, unluckily, very ill, and was waited upon by a girl named Hilda, who spoke exactly like a highly-educated English lady. She had a charmingly modulated voice, and her words were well chosen, though she was a simple, barefooted girl in a cotton gown with a handkerchief on her head.

“How is it, Hilda, you speak so nicely?” I asked in wonder.

She showed a row of even milk-white teeth in a smile.

“I don’t know, ma’am,” she said. “Perhaps it is because I have lived with my mistress for thirteen years and learned to talk as she does.”

This is what may be, but as a rule is not.

They tell a story of an inspector at a school examining the children in general knowledge.

“How many feet has a cat?” he asked smiling.

A row of black eyes looked at him stolidly.

He asked again, but still there was no dawning intelligence in those eyes. He began to wonder. Didn’t they have cats in this place? Then the teacher stood up.

“How many foot puss hab got?”

And they answered as one.

I could wish that the schools were better equipped, for the negro patois, amusing as it is, is still but patois, and though negro voices can be soft and pleasant, often I have heard them talking among themselves with very ugly intonations indeed.

And yet it is a shame to complain, for though it is delightful to live amidst lovely scenery, it is always the people who add piquancy to life. And the Jamaican peasant was always adding to my joy. He didn’t mean to do it. It was when he was most natural I got the best results.

On Kempshot Pen one day the head man came reporting that the men had—like men all over the world—struck for higher wages. But they chose the wrong time. Their mistress could do without them, and she did.

“Tell them,” she said, “they can go. I can manage.” And they set out to enjoy themselves. About an hour later she was aroused by a loud wailing, and in burst a man with his eyes starting out of his head and the lower part of his face a bloody pulp. She did not recognise one of her own men, and he could only gug—gug—gug, and splutter blood and broken teeth. But there were two shamefaced men at the gate who looked as if they had broken all the commandments, and expected to be well beaten for it.

“It was Victor,” they explained.

“Victor!”

Then they told the story. As they were on strike Victor had decided to go shooting. But his gun, an old muzzle-loading affair, declined to go off. He proceeded to investigate and blew down the barrel, while another man kindly applied a fire stick to the touch-hole. The matter was settled in half a second, and he received most of a charge of small shot in the lower part of his face. It looked horrible enough, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, for either the powder was damp or he had been economical with it. But his wounds were far beyond all simple household skill, and his mistress could only pack him off on a donkey to the doctor in the town below.

An open-air life and a vegetable diet is apparently good for the healing of gun-shot wounds, for long before we expected him, Victor was back again, but slightly scarred and smiling. He was quite well, he explained, and had only lost “a toof or two.” The doctor said he had taken away half his upper jaw, but as he didn’t know he had an upper jaw that didn’t trouble him.

Meanwhile at the time of the accident the head man had improved the occasion.

“See what happen to Victor when you no work,” said he, and every man jack came back to work without a word about the extra money they had felt they could not do without, and worked so well that the surprised pen owner found she had three days’ work done in one.

It seemed to me extraordinary, but she only laughed. She was accustomed to their superstitions working that way. Once she had contracted with a man named Maxwell to come and shoe her horses, to come always the moment he was sent for. He agreed readily enough, but the day a horse cast a shoe and she sent for him, he sent back word he was cutting bush and could not come. Well, she could not wait, so sent for another man, and just as he was finishing the job, into the yard came Maxwell with a bandage over his eye.

“Why, Maxwell, I thought you couldn’t come.”

“I come now, missus.”

“But what’s the matter with your eye?”

“Well, missus, a bit of bush, he jump up an’ lick me in de eye.”

That bit of bush had licked him to such a tune that all the lower eyelid had been torn away, and the dismayed girl could only apply boracic ointment as something harmless, and recommend his going down to a doctor at once. But before he went he assured her solemnly that she had only to send for him for the future, and on that instant he would come up, and up till now he has kept his word. He is afraid some evil thing will happen to him if he does not shoe the Kempshot horses the moment they require his services.

All over the country are dotted little churches, mostly Baptist, but true it is as Huxley—was it not—once said, “Man makes God in his own image.” The damsel, the new housemaid making my bed on the verandah, feelingly remarked upon how cold I must be. It is pleasantly cool towards morning, that is the most that can be said for it, but the real truth came out when Sam was brought outside to share in the delights of the starlit night.

“Poor little baby,” sighed Leonie, “Oh, poor little baby. Missus not taking him outside?”

“Why not?”

“Oh, missus,” in shocked tones, “bad for baby.”

“But why?”

Long hesitation—and then out it came. “He small. Dey can kill him easy.”

It was very startling. “Who will kill him?” Much wriggling. She evidently didn’t like to mention it, but she felt the case was desperate.

“Dem tings dat walk about at night.”

“What things?”

We’d seen nothing larger than a mongoose. They may go about at night for all I know, they certainly tore about the grass in the daytime, but I really did not think by the hurried manner in which they declined our acquaintance they’d come very near.

She paused, wriggled again, rubbed first one foot against a neat brown leg and then the other, put her fingers half way down her throat and whispered as she rolled her eyes—

“De duppies.”

No! One couldn’t smile, she was so desperately in earnest, so really concerned for the sake of the little helpless baby. We older women might chance things, but she evidently felt it was playing it low down on the baby to expose him to such risks.

“Oh, duppies! There aren’t any duppies.”

“Yes, missus,” and her eyes turned towards where, on the shores of the Caribbean, the Montego Bay dead lie resting, sleeping their long last sleep amidst coco-palms and gorgeous flamboyant trees. Oh, a lovely graveyard, and the sea breeze sweeps across it in the daytime, and by night comes whispering the scented wind from the hills. “Dey catch yous”—she grew excited and slurred her words—“tear yous to pieces.”

We are naturally brave. “Oh, Buffer will settle them.” Buffer being the nearest approach to a bull terrier we could get in Jamaica, a powerful and handsome white dog.

Again she shook her head mournfully. “Dey tear him to pieces.”

But in spite of all we slept outside and she shook her head mournfully, “Poor little baby!”

When the duppies did not take us the servants only considered for some reason or other the evil day was postponed. No one liked passing that graveyard a quarter of a mile away at night.

Indeed, this faith in evil spirits seems pretty general, even among people who are a shade higher in the social scale than a house servant.

When we were at the Hyde and Sam was very tiny, we used to put him in his cradle on the porch outside the front door, and leave him there to sleep in the fresh air.

To me one day came the “Busha” of the estate, a brown man, who naturally held a position of authority.

“Mrs Gaunt,” he said uneasily, “the baby is alone.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Yes, I see he’s asleep. But Mrs Gaunt—we never leave a baby alone.” Then he hesitated quite a long time and added, “it’s dangerous.”

I thought of what could possibly harm a sleeping baby. We were close against the mountains. Eagles? But there weren’t any eagles, and I didn’t expect they would swoop down at the house front if there were. Turkey buzzards? Yes, there were “John Crows.” I’d even seen the birds of carrion on the verandah rails.

“Oh, the ‘John Crows,’ I never thought they’d hurt him.”

“They won’t. They won’t touch anything alive. But, Mrs Gaunt,” he sank his voice and spoke very slowly and impressively, “we never leave a baby alone. We believe that the spirits come and play with them and it’s bad.”

He was evidently afraid that as a white woman I would laugh at this, and he had only spoken out of the kindness of his heart, because the baby was in danger. But, of course, I did not laugh. Why should I laugh at faiths other than mine? And so encouraged, he told me of the spirits he had seen in broad daylight, spirits that clothed themselves as his friends, and only when he came up close did he perceive they were, as he put it, evil spirits.

Well, as a matter of fact, when he was not likely to be about we let Sam sleep on the porch, and outside he continued to sleep at night in spite of Leonie’s protest, and so far as I can see neither duppy nor evil spirit ever did him the least harm, dear little man. In fact he continued to improve till he was the fine baby of the district, and I set it down to the fresh air in which he lived day and night. I am afraid I wickedly used the faith in duppies to my own advantage. Buffer hated a black man. At Montego Bay he used to sit outside the gate and kindly allow people to pass on the other side of the road, but if they came too near the territory he was guarding, he stepped out and held them up. If we heard a squeal we knew it was a woman, if a howl, a man, and flew to the rescue, but if they threw stones at him it almost took a motor car to shift him. He had a great reputation, and there was no predial larceny round my house, chickens and eggs were quite safe. But the people were afraid of him, and when I went for a walk with Buffer peacefully trotting along by my side, for he wouldn’t have dreamt of touching anybody away from his own ground, I was more than once met by a line of furious women with sticks uplifted.

“Kill! kill!” they shouted, and I thought of the old days when they would have killed a white woman if they could and not only her dog. It was really awe inspiring. I was afraid they would fling their sticks at Buffer, and then somebody would be hurt. And the men too threatened, “We kill dat dog!”

I thought they would do it too, do it in some cruel and lingering fashion, so I threatened in my turn. “If you touch that dog and hurt him so that he has to die, I warn you his duppy will haunt you, and I tell you the duppy of a big white dog is a much worse thing than the dog himself, for you will not be able to get rid of that!”

And I heard afterwards they said, “Missus go put him duppy on we.” And I had a reputation as a duppy raiser, and Buffer survived till I could get him away to Kempshot Pen, where he had more range, and where his fighting qualities are much valued by his new mistress.

Still is the faith in Obeah strong in Jamaica. It is the ju-ju of the Coast, and all the historians have many tales to tell of its dread powers.

In the year 1780, the parish of Westmoreland was kept in a constant state of alarm by a runaway negro called Plato, who had established himself among the mountains and collected a troop of banditti, of which he was the chief. He robbed very often and murdered occasionally. This could not be allowed, and at last Plato was taken and condemned to death. He told the magistrates who condemned him that his death would be revenged by a storm which would lay waste the whole island that year, and when his negro jailer was binding him to the stake—he was evidently burned to death according to the ruthless custom of the time—he told him he should not live long to triumph in his death, for that he had taken good care to Obeah him before quitting prison.

It certainly did happen, strangely enough, says Matthew Lewis, that before the year was over there was the most violent storm ever known in Jamaica, and as for that jailer, “his imagination was so forcibly struck by the threats of the dying man, that although every care was taken of him, the power of medicine exhausted, and even a voyage to America undertaken in hopes that a............