has a butler who can mix the best planters' punch in Jamaica. Mistress, who does not drink planters' punch, suggested after a while that the butler appeared to do nothing but mix punches. Womanlike, she refused to admit the argument that with prime golden rum available at two shillings a quart, it was economy to use as much as possible. So one day when an acquaintance wanted a butler, she sent him there, ostensibly as a loan.

My dear Mary:

Will you lend me your cook, butler, and waitress next Wednesday for our garden party and supper?

and the other lady, without asking her servants, will reply: My dear Helen:

I shall be delighted. I shall send you our yard-boy, too. He will report to you early in the morning.

Drawn by W. M. Berger "THE YARD-BOY"

The yard-boy is not necessarily a boy. He is called yard-boy because he is the outdoors servant, and the "yard" in Jamaican language is the ground about the house, however large. He runs errands, chops wood for cook, carries burdens, and holds and attends to visitors' horses. Every well-conducted establishment has a yard-boy, and a very excellently well-conducted establishment has two or three, with, of course, a coachman. We, not being an excellently well-conducted establishment, have none. After our visitors' horses have climbed the coral road to our cliff-dwelling, nobody needs to hold them.

The position of yard-boy in our garden is filled speculatively by Sammy, who works by the job. Sammy has many strange arts. He cures chickens of the pip by doing something to them with at stick. Sometimes the chicken survives. Also he can chop a whole cord of heartlessly hard logwood and bully-wood with a rusty machete. When there are garden parties, there are only half a hundred of us among five thousand natives, and the half-hundred give one another parties in cessantly, Sammy carries our contributions of furniture.

Sammy is not extortionate. He carries two mighty benches, a dozen chairs of honest mahogany, and three or four tables

of still more honest and heavy mahogany to the tennis-court half a mile away, and brings them back, for a net charge of sixpence. Sammy gets the same sum for going to the town, a mile and a half away, and bringing back twenty-five pounds of ice, which, of course, he brings on his head.

Cook considers Sammy an overpaid man. When cook goes to market in the town, she hires a man or woman who will carry a box-load of marketing on the head and a basketful in each hand for threepence. That is not so cheap as it appears to the careless American eye. The Jamaican penny is worth two cents in our money, so the charge for the little walk out and back again is really six cents.

It is not as low as the standard rate per mile established by the Government in the case of the Milk River mail-carrier in an adjoining district. His daily walk with a mail-pouch containing mail for several villages is thirty-two miles, making 192 miles a week, and his salary is ten shillings a week, which makes his rate of pay one and a quarter cents a mile. However. the bearers in the market do not expect private employers to be as economical as the Government can afford to be.

Cook's wages are five shillings a week, which is a shilling more than the standard. It is in consideration of the fact that we are bodies in unstable equilibrium, being weakly susceptible to the temptations of chance steamships. It makes cook's tenure uncertain; but she is always ready to depart with her tin trunk and her multitudinous bundles, and so far, whenever we have returned, we have found her sitting on that tin trunk in front of the house.

The other servants get four shillings a week, and their lodgings in the servants' quarters. With the exception of a stated allowance of bread and sugar, they provide their own food. This is a condition and not a theory. In Jamaican housekeeping there is no margin for surreptitious pickings. The tropics being unblessed by the cold-storage philanthropist and the preservative chemist, the day's provisions are brought in fresh every morning, and the day's purchases are limited strictly to the needs of the day. Besides, the Jamaican servants prefer their own food. Instead of coffee, they fancy a decoction of

cola-nut, and they like a native tea brewed from a weed that grows in the gardens and the bush. They are not meat-eaters. They live largely on "bread-kind," which is anything in the nature of yams, plantains, breadfruit, or cassava.

It is quite impossible to reconcile cook's indifference to food for herself with her exquisite care in cooking for us. But, then, it must be admitted that cook is a pearl of undoubted and rare price even in Jamaica. Good cooks do not grow on every bush there, nor do other good ser⚫ vants; but the beauty of it is that if a good cook or servant is not found on one bush, there are many other bushes.

When Mistress lent the admirable butler away, she sent a boy into town to bring her out some butleresses. The use of this haughty word is not due to a spirit of personal ostentation, but to the butleress's professional pride. The boy returned in much less than an hour with a very fair line of samples. Edith was the result.

Edith left us after two months because she had words with the cook. As she told Mistress, regretfully, "I carn't bring myself, Mistress, to be respectful to no black nigger."

"We must forgive her, Mistress," said cook, after Edith had removed herself, with her tin trunk on top of her head and her hat and the white kid slippers in isolated grandeur on top of the trunk. "It been not too much time since her people reside in bush and wear no clothes at all."

Edith's successor, Ione, had to leave us with mutual regret. Circumstances of a magic nature over which neither side had control forced the separation. Somebody Somebody had put an obi on Ione. It was a wasting obi, and though to the naked eye Ione's one hundred and fifty-odd pounds seemed to cling to her robustly, she knew herself. to be doomed unless she could locate the obi. Finally a skilful conjureman found it for a sixpence; but unfortunately for us, he was inconsiderate enough to find it near the house, under a famous silk-cotton-tree, the mighty buttress roots of which are notorious in all the district as being a very dangerous duppy-hole.

Next to the terrible and fatal Rolling Calf, duppies are the most fearful ghosts in Jamaica. Even cook, who does not exactly believe in duppies, has her opinion of that silk-cotton-tree after dark. The

obi-laden Ione simply could not remain anywhere near it.

The lady who has taken Ione's position is a little slower than the well-known mill of the Gods, and not nearly so sure. An order for drinks inevitably means three trips to the pantry for her, and the house is a house of magnificent distances, with the pantry at the end of the most magnificent distance.

On the first trip she brings the bottles very neatly on her serviette-covered tray. "The glasses, Juliet?" says Mistress, raising her eyebrows.

"Yes, if you please. Forgive me, Mistress," says Juliet.

"And the corkscrew, Juliet!" demands Master after the second trip.

"Yes, if you please. Forgive me, Master," says Juliet.

But when she arrives with it finally, she does not slam it down before her troublesome employers. She will run-no, not run-up-stairs and down-stairs all afternoon for tea and cake and more tea, and drinks, and ice, and more ice, and more tea, and never is there anything except a "Yes, please, Mistress," out of Juliet.

We have a neighbor, an American like ourselves, who does not agree with the rest of us about this Island of Servants. He is a charming gentleman, but when he gets on the subject of native servants he is not to hold or yet to bind. He swears that he will import Chinamen or Japanese or East Indian coolies at any expense. Sometimes he wishes that the island might be submerged in the sapphire Caribbean for an hour. We observe, however, that he has just built himself an expensive house and bought a plantation.

And Master, with a gentle shudder as of one who hears ghost-stories in pleasant company, thinks of his New York streets. He and Mistress look out over their ever-blooming garden, and there is utter peace: cook looking disapprovingly through her enormous spectacles at a vulture that is looking too approvingly on a chicken that she is plucking; the laundress hanging the wash (very white) on convenient bushes and the hen-coop; Sammy repairing the garden faucet with a piece of string which plainly is going to be entirely inadequate; and Juliet moving majestically like molasses from the cook-house with afternoon tea.

EXCEPT that the co like nothing so

XCEPT that the color is dead-flesh

much as only a child's ten-cent sail-boat. But the suggestion of horror in the triangular fin leisurely cutting the surface of green water! If a human being were out there,-bone and blood and tender, pink skin, and the fin drew nearerNo, the soul breaks back before the suggested picture. The humanness of the soul will not have the picture. It arrests the last grisly stroke.

The humanness of the soul! Of every soul, I think. Would you care to know what a dirty scoundrel did? I'll just let the noun and epithet stand. "Dirty scoundrel" was his own description, and he had deserved it. There 's no sense in trying to get around that.

His name was Yell. It stood out on the passenger-list, and the other American passengers, idly reading down our cards at our first meal out of Vera Cruz, where we had come on board, paused at that name. Our other names were just the usual ones-names, nothing more, until we should find one another out during the voyage before us. Which of us was Yell, we wondered; and eyes went questing up and down the board on the same errand. Who was Yell? Luther Yell? The great reformer's surname made Christian!

He proved to be a big, rock-hewn, grizzled man of fifty, maybe. Truly a man of frame and countenance that one loved to look at; a type of gaunt, weathered, God-fearing, naught-else-fearing, competent sea-captain. Competent comes last, and includes the others. One rested comfortably in the feeling of his competence. One would not fear storms at sea with this man on the bridge. Yet, as it turned out, he was not a sea-faring man at all. It was simply that a similar hard school for body and brain and eternal soul had put that kind of brand on him; and the man is the thing, after all.

The strength of his limbs seemed so satisfyingly at one with the strength of

his brow and eyes and mouth; rugged and in repose, I mean. And kindly; yes, and kindly, too. All his features were large, and his head was long and squared, so that his jaws were lank. His hair was thick, virile; and hair, short beard, and shaggy mustache were a strong iron gray. His mouth was good-humored, not grim; and his steely blue eyes were, too. His eyebrows were darker than his beard, and they were overlined by a crease in the brow, made up of many fine wrinkles, shaped like a gull on the wing. He was quiet, uncommunicative about himself; yet this was not because of any lack of ease. Although grimy overalls would have seemed more congruous on his rawboned frame than the tailored clothes he wore, he could not be imagined as awkward in either. He was too downright, calmly downright, for that. What he did or said was with the grace of driving a nail true, which is more of grace than there is in a minuet. No, obviously his character had been too painfully chiseled out of rock for anything like faltering diffidence ever.

Scarcely the portrait of a scoundrel, you will say. A man to be trusted, rather; particularly to be trusted. Well, yes. One felt that instinctively and gratefully. It is good to feel that way about a fellowbeing; and when you do, you have a sense of owing him something. As a sort of hypothesis, though, consider a man who has wantonly toyed with the responsibilities of life. Take a train-despatcher, for instance, at some water-tank, rebellious because of the smallness of his compensation and the gloom of outlook generally; and in one of these mutinous lapses he lets a comet of human freight get by him when he should have hung out the red lantern. He can neither see nor hear the wreck that is happening off yonder in the dark; but an angel, Remorse, in the devil's flaming cloak screeches the details of the scene, rasping every quivering fiber of him that is human. That man, having entertained

that visitor once, will never make another such mistake. The chances are that he is more to be trusted henceforth than another yet guiltless. And years afterward he will look like a man to be trusted, the same as this man Yell.

Now about the triangular fin. The ship had anchored off Progreso, and that means several miles off, the day after leaving Vera Cruz. There were Yucatan planters and their families to go ashore, after a week of national holiday in Mexico City, and there were bales on bales of henequen to come on board, so that we were rocked by the swell nearly all the afternoon, and had nothing to do except to sit around on deck and get acquainted.

A small group of us sat at the stern rail, where we had drawn our chairs to watch the sharks, which were foraging for what might be dumped out of the cook's port. There was a fascination in watching the lazy, sluggish shadows in the liquid emerald, as there always is for mortal man. A drop of ten feet from the overhang of the stern, and one would be among them. Oh, well, it was the usual fascination of beckoning eternity; a particularly horrible phase, that was all.

On the main deck just below, which was open around the stern, an engineer and two or three of the crew were baiting a line. We could partly see them down the companionway, but we did not know then that they were baiting the line with dynamite. We drowsily rose and fell with the swell, peering down between the rails to see the line cast. I am afraid it gave us a pleasurable thrill to fancy one of those tigerish monsters swallowing a grappling-hook. Here was a sport without the drawback of feeling that we ought to sympathize with the victim. We could sate our pagan lust for blood-letting with a pious conscience. We cannot often have our Roman holiday.

Our fellow-passenger Yell was near by, his slippered feet on the lower rail, reading a technical book of some sort, about dikes and dams, probably. Some of us had heard of him, and recalled that Luther Yell was the big contractor who had been putting in several million pesos worth of jetties for the Mexican Government. In his quiet way he kept among us, and seemed content with fellowship around him, without being actually of us.

As for the sharks, he was not interested. Evidently they were an old story.

Then came a steward aft, stupidly half reeling, his face vacuous, yet defiant.

"Does my room, that lump," remarked an Orizaba coffee-planter from Paterson, New Jersey. "I rather thought my tequila was ebbing mighty fast through the bottom of the bottle."

He's the same pirate," said another of our group, "who spilled the gravy over Mr. Yell at supper last night."

"Wait till an officer sees him," said another. "They 'll find a cooler for him."

If only for his undress, including bare feet, as he had emerged from dawdling in the torrid forecastle, they would have put him out of sight; but so far no one in authority had spied him.

We watched him in the amused disgust of prosaic sobriety. He was a whitishhaired, pink-cheeked, well-built fellow of past thirty; a chinless, weak, dissolute specimen, subdued enough ordinarily, but doggedly resentful of metes and bounds, as we perceived, when liquor was in him. Abruptly one of us sat up a little straighter. Something in the lowering intentness of the steward as he came nearer gave us all the feeling that he was out for trouble, that he had been bibbling deliberately with trouble in mind, and now with discipline comfortably cobwebbed in a foggy perspective, that he was ready for it-trouble. The rest of us sat up a little straighter, except Yell, who was apart from the group, and oblivious in his book. It was against Yell's reclining deck-chair that he lurched; accidentally, we thought.

"Eh, son," the old man looked up quizzically at the flushed face,-"making heavy weather of it, seems like." He, too, supposed the jolt accidental, and resumed his book, not minded to notice the interruption any further.

But the steward made no effort to detach himself from the support of the passenger's chair. Instead, he brought his face closer to the old man's; and as he would have pitched over the arm of the chair across the other's lap, he caught at the farther arm of the chair, and so steadied himself after a fashion. With features working, he looked down at the old man over the edge of the book.

"What a breath!" said Yell. "Man, ain't you clear yet?"