he French Creoles likewise--
are regarded by Negro and by Indian.

For there are a few Indians remaining in the northern mountains, and
specially at Arima--simple hamlet-folk, whom you can distinguish, at
a glance, from mulattoes or quadroons, by the tawny complexion, and
by a shape of eye, and length between the eye and the mouth,
difficult to draw, impossible to describe, but discerned instantly
by any one accustomed to observe human features. Many of them,
doubtless, have some touch of Negro blood, and are the offspring of
'Cimarons'--'Maroons,' as they are still called in Jamaica. These
Cimarons were Negroes who, even in the latter half of the sixteenth
century (as may be read in the tragical tale of John Oxenham, given
in Hakluyt's Voyages), had begun to flee from their cruel masters
into the forests, both in the Islands and in the Main. There they
took to themselves Indian wives, who preferred them, it is said, to
men of their own race, and lived a jolly hunter's life, slaying with
tortures every Spaniard who fell into their hands. Such, doubtless,
haunted the northern Cerros of Tocuche, Aripo, and Oropuche, and
left some trace of themselves among the Guaraons. Spanish blood,
too, runs notoriously in the veins of some of the Indians of the
island; and the pure race here is all but vanished. But out of
these three elements has arisen a race of cacao-growing mountaineers
as simple and gentle, as loyal and peaceable, as any in Her
Majesty's dominions. Dignified, courteous, hospitable, according to
their little means, they salute the white Senor without defiance and
without servility, and are delighted if he will sit in their clay
and palm ajoupas, and eat oranges and Malacca apples {157} from
their own trees, on their own freehold land.

They preserve, too, the old Guaraon arts of weaving baskets and
other utensils, pretty enough, from the strips of the Aruma leaves.
From them the Negro, who will not, or cannot, equal them in
handicraft, buys the pack in which wares are carried on the back,
and the curious strainer in which the Cassava is deprived of its
poisonous juice. So cleverly are the fibres twisted, that when the
strainer is hung up, with a stone weight at the lower end, the
diameter of the strainer decreases as its length increases, and the
juice is squeezed out through the pores to drip into a calabash,
and, nowadays, to be thrown carefully away, lest children or