ada was much troubled by an old woman who persisted in making a short cut through her garden. Threats of punishment and even of arrest were ineffective. At last she permitted her coachman to use methods of his own, as he had wished to do from the first. He asked for two shillings, and went away, presumably to a witch-doctor, or obi-man, for when he returned he had a bottle full of water, with a rusty nail and a dead cockroach in it. This he tied prominently to a bush where the old woman used to enter. She appeared as usual next morning, balked like a horse when she saw the fearful charm,

"THE OLD LADY KNEW ONLY TOO WELL"

and never troubled that garden again. The old lady knew only too well that a duppy would be set on her.

In our own domestic establishments more or less magic always has been an inherent part of the housekeeping. A noted duppy lived near our garden, and an

enemy set it on one of our housemaids. Naturally she could do little work after that, as she had to prepare herself for inevitable death. However, she was beloved of a shoemaker in the village, and he went to an obi-man for counter-treatment. There were many occult councils in our house. The obi-man came disguised as an honest tradesman, but we knew what he was, and he knew that we knew it. He merely refrained from letting us see what he did, because in the British West Indies the unthinking white man loves dearly to put an obi-man into jail.

Learned as the obi-man was, he did not know how far a field-glass can look. Therefore I had the privilege of seeing him bury his anti-duppy virus under a silkcotton-tree. I was bold enough to dig it up. It was a collection of dead lizards, a bottle with a rag tied about it, and a liberal assortment of bones.

The afflicted young woman recovered, but, like all her sex, was ungrateful. As soon as she was well she discarded the shoemaker, who had given his whole hoard of money to the obi-man, and took up with another young man. The shoemaker was a good church-member, and while he could stretch a point and deal with sorcery to take a duppy off, it would have imperiled his soul to put a duppy on, as the selfish hussy well knew. Thereafter our house and garden were afflicted by an afflicted shoemaker till we had to sever our connection with the cause of the trouble.

One of our neighbors was less fortunate. We lost only a housemaid. She lost all her servants within an hour, and had a desperate time getting others. Somebody had buried a bottle with a nail in it near the door of the cook-house.

Our next dangerous visitant from the under-world was a black hen. Mistress bought it when the cook was not present. Now, black hens always are objects to be scrutinized with care. This black hen, before it had been with us an hour, uttered a hoarse, un-henlike sound-an amateurish, but unmistakable, attempt at crowing.

The servants evaded the glance of that hen instantly. The cook, usually obedience incarnate, declined flatly to cook it. The witch thing disappeared that night, and we have excellent reason to believe

that the cook paid somebody out of her own income (five shillings a week) to avert the danger from the heads of her beloved, but reckless, Mistress and Mars

ter.

Our next experience was a "sending." It looked innocent enough, being merely two white pigeons that flew out of the jungle one morning and took up their dwelling under the upper gallery of the house. They were pretty pigeons, but they cooed. They cooed all day, they roused themselves at night to coo deliriously, and they cooed us awake long before dawn. We bore it. The household was mortally afraid of those pigeons, and wise white people in the tropics who have good servants do not laugh at their beliefs, or even smile where they can see it.

However, patience ceased when the pigeons had been with us two weeks and, by constant practice, had perfected their cooing apparatus to outrageous limits. One day Marster appeared in the garden with his rifle, plainly bent on shooting the magic. The housemaid scuttled into her sleeping-quarters and closed the shutter. The laundress dropped a piece of linen and vanished. The butleress covered her head with cloths and crouched in the pantry. Only cook kept her nerve, though she thought Marster indiscreet to the point of foolhardiness. Cook even nerved herself to cook the suspected birds. But she and the whole household watched furtively, breathlessly, at the dining-room door while Mistress and Marster ate them, and they did not look cheerful again till the dinner was undoubtedly digested.

"Those old Africans!" said an English West Indian when I told him one night about cook's occult knowledge. Whenever a man in the West Indies makes that opening remark, he is going to tell a ghost-story. "Ever hear of old Francis?" Yes, some of the men had; but they expressed no objection to hearing it again.

"My wife and I," said the man, "were driving one moonlight night through a beautiful double row of old tamarindtrees that leads to an estate that 's been

keeping us poor. It's in charge of a caretaker, mostly. Well, suddenly the horses snorted, and there directly in front of us was an old black man. The horses were going fast, but he kept ahead of us, never changing his distance. I shouted

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"Please God, Marster, him not hurt you. Him old Francis. Come every Saturday night; no hurt anybody.'

"Old Francis," continued the storyteller, "had been a slave on the place. Just for fun I looked up the old slavebooks, and found his name and description. Under the column 'Remarks,' he was put down as exceptionally valuable for his knowledge of herbs and vegetable drugs. He had been dead almost a hundred years. Remember that my wife saw the man as well as I did."

He was an Englishman, as ruddy as beef and as stout as ale; and he told that story. Nobody laughed.

It was a full-moon night, and the savanna, with its belt of bush, lay staring white and indigo black. In the jungle insects and toads were hissing, whirring, droning, humming, tinkling, chirping. Lizards on the ceiling of the verandas and in the vines yelped with a croak like a

watchman's-rattle. On the table, adoring the lamp, squatted a praying mantis half a foot long, with its insect hands folded and its head nodding intelligently. Deep in the bush, from a hut hidden in its mammoth growths, came a sound of tapping and a monotonous negro-chant:

You want to yerry duppy talk, oh! Come go da ribber before day, an' you will yerry dem laugh, oh! Come go da ribber before day, you want to yerry duppy talk, oh!

"Every white man who lives any number of years in the tropical bush, Eastern or Western Hemisphere, gets a little superstitious," said one of the guests after a while. "You see and hear so many queer things. I've seen queer things in western Africa, and things almost as queer here in Jamaica, and in Grenada and Trinidad and St. Vincent."

He was an administrative official of the empire. His specialty is blue-books on colonial finance. The man writes bluebooks with the passionate fervor with which other men write love-letters.

"Only a few years ago," he continued, "I witnessed one of those famous West Indian sending of stones. It was in a house in my district. The occupants, two brothers, had no known enemies. Nobody had attempted to get any money from them. One night stones began to fall on their house. They came from all directions apparently, sometimes singly, sometimes in little showers. They sent for me next day and showed me the stones. They were all smooth, rounded things, indubita

bly from a river-bed; yet there was no river within ten or more miles.

"That night I watched with a colleague who had police charge of the district. The stones began falling as soon as it was dark. We had constables hidden all about the house, with orders to beat the grounds in all directions as soon as the throwing began. It was during their beating that the shower was worst. At last stones began to fall inside of the house in every room where there was no light. When we went in with a light, the falling ceased there, but we found the stones on floor, beds, and furniture. Yet there was no gap in the ceilings and the windows were shuttered and bolted.

"Now, I saw all this. I stayed there till the sending was ended, and I superintended the collecting of the stones. Every one was a river stone, while all the district about the house is coral stone. I doubt if you could find a water-worn pebble anywhere if you set a hundred people to search. How these stones, enough in quantity to fill twenty or more bushelbaskets, were brought from the distant river, how they were hidden, how any one could throw them with a score of bushwise native constables watching, we don't know to this day. The thing lasted a week or more. Then the sending ended

as it began.'

"Hum!" I muttered.

"I saw it, you know," said the bluebook man, mildly.

"And have n't you any theory?" asked somebody.

"None," he said. "No theory, but a comment. I'd simply remind you that sendings of stones in the West Indies used to be almost as common as sending postalcards. That was while we still were a little delicate about handling obi-men drastically, because the people virtually worshiped them. Since we 've locked up obi-men right and left, the sendings of stones have become rare."

"Still, don't you know," said the man who had seen old Francis, "if you say obi-men did it, you don't explain how they did it, do you, old chap?"

"It can be explained perfectly, of course, by magic. Certainly it is magic, and magic alone, that prevents everybody from getting any of the many Spanish treasures that everybody knows to be hidden everywhere around the Caribbean coasts. The exact whereabouts of much of this treasure is known. There is a hoard under nearly every Spanish ruin. There is a hoard in virtually every Spanish well. And those who know about them are not selfish with the information. They tell everybody else. I know of at least a dozen wells, and a score or more of old walls in Cuba alone, that were pointed out to me by comparative strangers. As to Jamaica, with a Spanish treasure hidden in virtually every sink-hole, the island may be said quite literally to be honeycombed with Spanish gold.

Sink-holes are the strange, crater-like holes that exist in mountainous limestone country throughout the West Indies, and in Jamaica particularly. The Cock-Pit Country, where the Jamaican maroons live, is nothing but sink-holes, some of them five hundred feet deep. As far down as one can see, the steep sides are clothed with creepers and orchids, giant ferns and vines and shrubs. They are eery places.

In every mountain village of Jamaica there will be at least one negro who has ventured into a sink-hole and has actually seen the Panya jaw.

The Panya jaw is not a jaw of an extinct animal, as was imagined a few years ago by a scientist from the North who knew paleontology better than he knew the amazing speech of the Jamaican bush. Panya jaws are "bush nagur" for Spanish jars. They are of immense size, big enough to hold a man. The Spanish gold is in them.

The trouble is that the old Spaniards. always killed the slave who helped them. hide the treasure, and this slave's duppy, faithful, so to speak, in death, guards the Panya jaws to this day. He is an extramagical duppy, for he possesses the power of making the Panya jaw sink away into the earth as soon as the hiding-place is invaded. All these facts defy successful contradiction. Too many bush-people have seen the entire proceeding, and more than a sprinkling of white men are credited with having looked into the Panyajaw matter.

Beside the Spanish jars, there are gold tables. These are not in caves or sinkholes, but in blue holes. Blue holes are deep places in the rivers where the water is wonderfully still and wonderfully, mysteriously, prodigiously blue. They are found throughout the Bahamas and the West Indies, and are enchanting things, as tranquil as a great blue eye of the sea, rimmed around with plumes and fans and spears of bizarre palm-growths, and overhung heavily with aërial ropes of plants that trail leaf and blossom to their hushed surface.

At sun-hot, which is noon, the golden tables rise slowly from the depths and can

be seen by anybody. One need not be a bush-native. A Scotch engineer told me that he had seen "not to say precisely a table, ye mind, but something-something that looked uncommon like one."

One of these golden tables lurks in the very heart of tourist country, the Bog Walk just outside of Kingston, Jamaica. Any tourist who wishes to test this need merely tell the driver to stop at sun-hot at the blue hole near Two Meetings. It is under a most beautiful overhanging rock that is crowned with a great silkcotton-tree, the branches of which shade the very place where the golden table hides.

An acquaintance who has a house near there says that it is the easiest matter in the world to keep servants at home at night. The odd, not to say fearful, sights to be seen after dark near that blue hole deter the most determined gadders.

The unthinking might say that it is curious that in a land where men can dive like fish, nobody dives down after the golden tables. But there is an excellent reason for this.

A Rubber Mama will be more than likely to be sitting on the table down there. Every river has a Rubber Mama. She is not made of rubber. She really is a River Mama. In the French West Indies, and those that were French once, such as Haiti, they call her mamadjo, meaning, probably, Mama d'eau.

The Rubber Mama is quite harmless if she is left alone. It is different with a far more plentiful spirit known as Rolling Calf. Rolling Calf visited our house one

night last winter; at least there was a most tremendous racket up and down the galleries, with nothing to see; and cook next morning told us that it was Rolling Calf.

"If I had not faith, Mistress and Marster," said cook, who is a devout Christian, "I would have bawled."

Rolling Calf is worse in many ways than even a duppy. A man may be walking quietly along a trail, making good thoughts, as the saying is, and all at once he will hear a hellish clatter coming fast behind him. It will be like a troop of shod horses, and it will be also like a cart with chains dragging. Intermingled with these sounds will be dull roars.

The man must run, of course; but Rolling Calf can run faster than any man. There is only one way to escape. As one runs, one must keep on "cutting ten" continually. Cutting ten is to make the sign of the cross. When Rolling Calf reaches the spot where ten was cut, he must go around it ten times.

This fortunate circumstance is the only thing that has prevented the negro population of the Caribbean from being virtually exterminated, for Rolling Calfs are frightfully prevalent.

I did not know why there are so many Rolling Calfs in the tropics until Sammy, our yard-boy, told me.

"Shopkeeper dat tief too much," said Sammy, "when him dead, him turn Rolling Calf."

The only thing I cannot understand now is why there are no Rolling Calfs in the North.