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for some time till we saw a considerable island, where we landed. We found that we had found the Island of Servants.

Of course this sounds like one of those Arabian Nights travelogues produced by the well-known Sindbad of Bassora. Sindbad, however, limited himself to easily credible matters, such as Islands of Diamonds. He protected himself also against the short, ugly word by concealing the latitude and longitude of his islands. I shall give the precise name of mine. Even the most unadventurous will find it an easy trip. One does not sail from Bassora, but from New York, which is not at all like Bassora except in being fully as dirty. The price is forty-five dollars.

In compliance with the copyright laws, Christopher Columbus must be credited with having discovered this island first. But it was not an Island of Servants at that time. It was an Island of Servant Problems. A steady correspondent to the old chronicles who signed himself Lopez Val describes these servant problems under date of 1587 as:

Being Indians of so hard a heart that they murthered themselves rather than they would serve the Spaniards. Never was there any people knowen of so resolute and desperate mindes; for oftentimes a great number of them being put together over night, they should be found all dead before the morning. Such extreme hate did this brutish people beare against the Spaniards!

It was an unsatisfactory condition. One could hardly have guests for dinner with a cook who, instead of performing on the victuals, was likely to perform on herself. One Spanish gentleman of undoubted genius told his Indians that if they went to the other world, he would kill himself, too, and meet them there, where he intended to make them work still harder. They objected so strenuously to his company for eternity that they settled down to temporary work on earth.

But the solution came too late, or was not effective with all the brutish people. A traveler, visiting the West Indies a few years after Val, was able to report that "some of these people are yet living, but very few."

The Spaniards do not own the island now. They turned it over to the English in Cromwell's time, in consideration of a handsome consignment of shot and shell. Its name is Jamaica.

Mr. John Hawkins, afterward knighted by Queen Elizabeth for distinguished services to civilization, was a chief instrument in making it the Island of Servants. He was a great lover of the Spanish Main, and highly indignant at the Spaniards for owning it. He was specially indignant at their cruel treatment of the Indians, and often expressed himself very feelingly on the subject to Elizabeth.

However, he was blessed with one of those consciences that a man can use in real life. So he always went to the Caribbean by way of Africa, where he took on as large a cargo of Africans as his conscience or cargo-space permitted. These he sold to the Spaniards in the West Indies. There was a Spanish law against the traffic, but the Spaniards had wiped out their original labor problem so successfully that they were eager for a new one. Besides, John used to train his guns on their towns as a sort of inducement to the open door.

Thus the British, when they moved into the island, found it one of the best-filled white man's burdens in the world, and it is getting fuller all the time, owing to an enthusiastic avoidance of race suicide.

Before eager housekeepers or speculators rush to the steamship offices to lay down their forty-five dollars with the intention of returning to the States with a ship-load of servants, they must take warning. They can get the ship-load. They need merely announce their desire from the deck on arrival in Jamaica, and the ship-load will deliver itself so impetuously that the entire royal constabulary will be needed to save the ship from being submerged below its Plimsoll's mark. But immediately on arriving in the States, or soon after, the ship-load will have become just the same old American problem.

To enjoy the Island of Servants, one must live where the island is. The crop will not transplant. One must not try to live in the port and city of Kingston. Kingston is a city, and a city is full of houses, and the law of supply and demand is inimical to human peace even in Jamaica.

In Kingston the servant problem is a perennial topic, as it is everywhere else. To sufferers fresh from the problem as it assaults one in the North, the Kingston problem may not be worthy of being called a problem. But to escape problems altogether, the way to do is to go to the railroad station instantly on arriving in Kingston, and demand a ticket for as far away as it is possible to go. You must demand it. Kingston dotes on strangers, and pretends to them that if they leave its protecting arms for the interior they will be devoured by ticks, mongooses, crocodiles, and natives.

Having extracted the ticket from the government railway, you enter a train the leading feature of which is simplicity of construction. In a few hours the simple train enters a city less land of mountain cones and deep-slashed valleys. Here and there, not too often, gleaming white spots amid the vast tumult of green show where there is a "great house," as the plantation. residences are called. Probably its master owns as far as he can see and beyond. The population works for him or rents small holdings.

The few towns are on the coast. With the exception of Montego Bay, on the ex

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treme north coast, they are small. There is a Jamaican story of a man who drove to visit a certain town. He drove through it, and ten miles beyond, looking for it. Inland, people consider themselves close neighbors if they live within five miles of one another. The upper class of the towns dwell scattered on the heights that overlook the towns and the Caribbean Sea. They do not squeeze themselves into suburban lots in Jamaica.

We landed in Montego Bay, strangers, one morning a few years ago. Two days before, off Cape Maysi, Cuba, the ship's wireless had sputtered into the trade-wind,

Drawn by W. M. Berger

"SHE BROUGHT TWENTY-FOUR PLATES STACKED ON HER HEAD"

and before we got near enough to Jamaica to tell whether a fantastic wonder swimming in the sky was cloud or Blue Mountain Peak, somebody in Montego Bay was engaging a house for us on the coral shore a mile and a half out of town.

We strolled into a merchant's office on arrival, and proclaimed that we wanted. servants at once. We did not know the merchant, but we knew the strains that West Indian hospitality will withstand. In half an hour there was a little regiment, men and women, before the door. In five minutes the merchant had singled out those whom he could recommend. We gave the house-keys to the one we hired as cook, and told her what we wanted for breakfast, meaning what is called luncheon in the North. She trotted off to market, followed by the others who had been hired-and followed, too, by a dozen unhired, who went in the hope of discovering some unfilled position in the retinue.

When we reached the house after a few hours' shopping, the table was ready and the meal was cooking. Also, the hopeful dozen, with some reinforcements, were sitting under the mango and poinciana trees in the garden, smiling hopefully and pleading, "Please, Marster," and "Good marneen, Missees." In the pantry the butler was mixing a planters' punch. The estimable creature had borrowed the rum from another household. I am aware that Mr. Sindbad would have worked this into a much more effective climax. But he was strikingly unhampered by truth. When one is constrained to tell only the truth, and the truth is so simple, it must perforce be told simply.

The truth has been as simple as that ever since. Some of it, indeed, seems too good to be truth. There is cook, for instance. She has been with us through three years, and she has never spoiled a meal except on one terrible day when she burned the soup. We know that it is preying on her mind, for she mentions it grimly at times.

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Cook is jealous of her title. Her own daughter, who is of the retinue, would not dream of addressing her by any other name; and the country people who climb our coral stone path every morning with head-loads of provisions fresh from the fields have awe of her.

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"SHE POPS INTO THE GARDEN TO CUT SOME GLORIOUS FIRE-RED FRUITS"

She buys most of the supplies. Mistress (cook is too superior to use the country form "Missees") is not supposed to lower herself by chaffering with people from the bush. Mistress acts only in an advisory capacity (from her hammock) after cook has succeeded in bringing the asking price into consonance with her somewhat bigoted ideas as to buying price.

She uses the outworn device of ruinous competition. She does not know that it is outworn. Most of the time she has half a dozen smiling, but frantic, ones standing in the garden before her cook-house while she incites them to underbid one another. Almost without fail, cook succeeds in getting some considerable reduction, such as a gill. A gill is three farthings. Now and then she makes a killing, and reduces somebody's price by a quatty. That is a field-day for her. A quatty is all of a penny ha'penny, or three cents in American coppers.

We do not see much of cook. Except when she pops into the garden to cut some glorious fire-red fruits from an akee

tree or order the yard-boy or the laundress to climb up for a breadfruit or a cocoanut, she lives secluded in her cook-house, which, as in all old-time Jamaican houses, is a short distance from the dwelling. All we know positively is that she must work some sort of magic, probably a beneficent obi; for no Northern cook would condescend to produce a luncheon of a single course with the trifling utensils with which cook will prepare a five- or sixcourse dinner, and for as many guests as we may happen to have.

The Jamaican landlord's ideas as to kitchen furnishings are so modest as to be almost immodest. When Mistress found that she could make an inventory of the kitchen on her visiting-card, she spoke to the landlord as soon as she could catch her breath. He explained that it would never do to give "these black people of ours" too much. They would simply break or lose everything. Since then, being of migratory habit, we have changed abodes several times, and if we thought that the first kitchen was of the utmost

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simplicity, we have found that there are degrees of simplicity more uttermost still. Every new landlord has explained over again to us that little explanation about. breakage or loss.

We believed it at first. I counted my money gloomily, and visioned it all passing away at the end of the season to pay the landlord for vanished things. When it became incumbent on us to give our first entertainment, we thought with terror of the smashing of crockery and glass that would punctuate the conversation.

Of

There were to be thirty guests. course we did not have dishes enough for half a dozen, but in Jamaica one lays his acquaintances under eternal obligations by borrowing from them. One of our maids arrived that morning from a borrowing tour. She brought twenty-four plates stacked on her head. In each hand she bore a large and heavy basket. When I saw her climb the rugged path, I could not take proper pleasure in her acrobatic accomplishment. I thought of the bill. Other people's servants arrived with other crockery perched on their heads. The Jamaican believes always that a mighty bundle on the head is worth two little ones in the hands. A man arrived at the house one day bearing on his head a live pig

strapped to a board. That was merely amusing. I should not have had to pay for the pig if it had fallen and broken. The sight of those mounds of crockery moving up the precarious path was terrible.

Nothing crashed. Since then we have given many entertainments. At a recent one we had forty guests, all eating from borrowed dishes; and some of our too hospitable Jamaican friends insisted on sending us their choicest European porcelain.

I have just asked Mistress to give me an exact list of the breakage and loss during the last three seasons. I have explained to her that I don't care about literary style in this matter, but minute truth. She states officially that the total number of missing articles has been one pepper-caster, which, however, we believe to have been a mythical pepper-caster in the first place. The dead and injured are three tumblers, one plate, and a butterdish, which lost a handle. As Edith, our late butleress, explained, "I put him to sleep on the hice, and him handle went away, Mistress."

This list sounds so much like Sindbad at his worst that I hardly dare venture on my next statement, which is that in Jamaica a hostess can invite as many guests as she pleases for as long a time as she pleases, and never has to wonder if her servants will stand it. They not only will stand it, but they will be pleased!

They make a festival of it. Edith used to show her delight by wearing her most precious garment, or, rather, garments, for it was a pair of them. They were white kid slippers, very low-cut and very highheeled. She wore them on her bare, very black feet. Edith always was a great and inexpensive joy to any Northern strangers whom we had as guests.

The other servants used their feet as nature had intended them to be used. When tourists return home and say that in Jamaica the servants wait on table barefoot, it does not create the proper impression unless they are accurate enough to add that the barefooted servants wear stiffly starched white dresses and that their black heads are crowned with snow-white or scarlet turbans, and that they often have crimson blossoms in their hair, and that the barefooted Jamaican girl walks as Hebe or Diana must have walked, and

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