The white inhabitants of Jamaica swear by the hill stations: Newcastle, Mandeville, Malvern, Belle Vue and the rest. The description of the journey to Newcastle will stand as an example of the manner in which one travels to each, except that, in some cases, the railway as well as the double-horse buggy is necessary for the journeying. The tourist should remember that what appeals to the sun-dried Jamaican Englishman does not of necessity appeal with the same force to a tourist in love with the tropics. For my part I found the hill stations all a little dull, as well as very cold and damp. Mandeville resembles a little English country village on a warm, wet day in autumn. Malvern is also very English, and though Belle Vue is more picturesque, it is not worth travelling four thousand miles to see. Kingston and the little towns of the plains repay even a bad sailor the two weeks spent in mid-ocean; the hill stations do not. They are a snare and a delusion and a hollow sham.

Nevertheless we went to them all in the manner of docile sightseers.

Mandeville is famous for its donkey market and cool breeze. I did not see the donkey selling in full swing, but from what I saw of the market-place and the little donkeys I can appreciate the picturesque possibilities of the affair. The cool breeze is far too cold; the cold, damp rain and rain-mist far too penetrating. No, I disagree with the Jamaicans in their estimate of their hill stations. No doubt they are picturesque—all of them. Little villages built on steppes of giant mountains, or small towns scattered over a high plateau. One experiences many climates in climbing to them, and the beauty of the country which separates them from the hot plains is magnificent beyond description. One passes forest land and dense scrub, rushing rivulets and the dry beds of larger rivers. One experiences every colour the imagination can conceive, and sees all the fruits, and flowers, and timber trees to be found in all the world. Yes, they have magnificent approaches these hill stations, and for that reason they are places to visit. It is only their climate one can object to, and that is wonderful too. The English climate gives an English influence to the growing shrubs, and in Mandeville one finds a village green and English trees fenced round by groves of tall pines, and feather bamboos, and wavy banana clumps,—England growing calmly with a green freshness in the midst of the yellow tropics. Perhaps I have done the places an injustice; they are really beautiful. It was the rain I disliked so much. You can stand on the edge of Mandeville and watch the sun setting in the

midst of great valleys of wondrous beauty. Or in the morning you can gaze through the damp mountain mist and see the yellow sun rising softly from amidst the forest of palm-trees. You can listen to the full-throated song of birds thanking God for the beauty of life, or see lizards all green and gold, playing along the boughs of giant forest trees. It is a good place, but somehow it lacks the airy-fairy lightness of the hot plains. The natives do not laugh so much, and they are more European in their dress and manners. There are white invalids in the place and you cannot forget that it is a sanatorium.

Belle Vue is rather better and more picturesque and not so good. These contradictions are permissable when one is writing of Jamaica. Belle Vue is better because it is less civilised and less damp. It is more picturesque because the only white man’s bungalow was built more than a hundred years ago, and because the natives are less intimately associated with the white people. It is not so good because it is not so beautiful.

Still the view there from the edge of the mountain shelf, which comprises the settlement, gives you a picture of Kingston and eight miles of its northern suburbs, and beyond Kingston the wonderful bay, Port Royal, the palisadoes and the ships at anchor and by the wharf side. This view is compensation for the fatigues of the journey upwards. The house too, the white man’s bungalow, is unique and full of history. People say that it is older than two centuries, and its appearance gives colour to the report. Heavy, arched doorways, great high rooms, solid fittings and small windows. The woodwork is hand-carved and very beautiful; the outbuildings are flimsy and very decrepid. Behind the bungalow is a farmyard built on the model of those to be found in England. There is a large water pool for the cattle, and an extensive yard for the convenience of the farm hands. Here we can see the dairy-work and watch the poultry strutting about in search of toothsome morsels. An occasional dog lies gasping in the sun, and now and then a little pig thrusts his nose into the gateway and gazes longingly at the place so cruelly denied him. The un-English parts are the sheds devoted to coffee-cooking and the place for the storing of cocoa and cinchona.

About the yard, among the coffee and cinchona huts, the cattle stand listlessly gazing earthward, and the mountain goats flick their tails in endless endeavour to disturb offending insects. It is rural—Arcadian in its simplicity and great beauty. The bungalow and farmyard are surrounded by a forest of pimento—an all-spice whose foliage is more fragrant than the spice which makes the cultivation prosperous. Some day, when Jamaicans awaken to the significance of the richness of their island, some one will distil the perfume from the pimento leaf, and in England we shall be able smell the wild fragrance of a Jamaican forest. Where the forests end the banana plantations commence, and dotted about the fields we find the native settlements.

Native settlements are all unique; they are all strange villages erected according to an architecture

peculiar to the minds of say fifty people. Each man builds his hut according to his own idea of what a hut should be like, and he digs the foundations with no regard for juxtaposition or the symmetry of the whole village. The result is always purely picturesque. Some huts are of heavy grass thatched with banana leaves; others are mud-thatched with cobbled floors. The richer natives build wood houses out of disused packing cases, and live under stencilled letterings which once directed a package out of England. One house was built with box-wood drawn from cases that had contained sugar, biscuits, marmalade, jam, cube-sugar and cigarettes. The result fanned one’s pride in the might of England’s commerce, since all these things were plainly marked London or Liverpool or Dundee.

About the huts, and amidst the plantations round the village, the black children played their Jamaican games with open-mouthed enthusiasm. The children of the country villages are not overburdened with unnecessary clothing and they are very strong and happy. By mixing with the little children one loses faith in the old belief that it is impossible to really civilise a coal-black nigger. The little ones differ from the white children only in the colour of their skins and the superiority of their physique. A negro child of two runs and laughs and plays as sturdily as does a London child of four. They have a little school of their own and a little church as well. Their one teacher is a lady of colour who lives well away from the village, but the parson is as black as the blackest among them. The teacher, who is a lady, wears eye-glasses; the parson affects spectacles heavily rimmed with yellow metal. On week days the people of the village, old and young, are very simple; on Sundays they are very religious. The women do more work than the men, though the men are not entirely given up to idleness. The women attend to the home life, the housework, and the nursing, and they tend the cultivation of the little family garden patch which supplies the family with yams and banana, and occasionally a little crop of luscious mangoes as well. The husband hires out his labour to the nearest planter and receives his wage of a shilling a day. He hoes the fields, sees to hedges, carries the water, drives the horses, or donkeys, or mules, or bullocks; gathers the ripened fruit, packs it for the market, and, when neither the planter nor the overseer is within eyeshot, idles away the time to his heart’s delight. The women are careful about their own adornment only on Sundays or those rare occasions when it is necessary for them to make the long journey into Kingston market. On week days they seem to wear whatever happened to come handiest when they were engaged in the act of dressing. The men wear long cotton drawers or the remains of heavy trousering, a very shady shirt, a battered yippo-yappo hat, and occasionally, an affair which undoubtedly at some remote period resembled a coat of the style affected by Europeans.