good and evil; and
independent she takes care to remain; and no schemes for civilising
the Negro will have any deep or permanent good effect which do not
take note of, and legislate for, this singular fact.

Meanwhile, it was a comfort to one fresh from the cities of the Old
World, and the short and stunted figures, the mesquin and scrofulous
visages, which crowd our alleys and back wynds, to see everywhere
health, strength, and goodly stature, especially among women.
Nowhere in the West Indies are to be seen those haggard down-trodden
mothers, grown old before their time, too common in England, and
commoner still in France. Health, 'rude' in every sense of the
word, is the mark of the negro woman, and of the negro man likewise.
Their faces shine with fatness; they seem to enjoy, they do enjoy,
the mere act of living, like the lizard on the wall. It may be
said--it must be said--that, if they be human beings (as they are),
they are meant for something more than mere enjoyment of life. Well
and good: but are they not meant for enjoyment likewise? Let us
take the beam out of our own eye, before we take the mote out of
theirs; let us, before we complain of them for being too healthy and
comfortable, remember that we have at home here tens of thousands of
paupers, rogues, whatnot, who are not a whit more civilised,
intellectual, virtuous, or spiritual than the Negro, and are
meanwhile neither healthy nor comfortable. The Negro may have the
corpus sanum without the mens sana. But what of those whose souls
and bodies are alike unsound?

Away south, along the low spit at the south end of the island, where
are salt-pans which, I suspect, lie in now extinguished craters; and
past little Nevis, the conical ruin, as it were, of a volcanic
island. It was probably joined to the low end of St. Kitts not many
years ago. It is separated from it now only by a channel called the
Narrows, some four to six miles across, and very shallow, there
being not more than four fathoms in many places, and infested with
reefs, whether of true coral or of volcanic rock I should be glad to
know. A single peak, with its Souffriere, rises to some 2000 feet;
right and left of it are two lower hills, fragments, apparently, of
a Somma, or older and larger crater. The lava and ash slide in
concave slopes of fertile soil down to the sea, forming an island
some four miles by three, which was in the seventeenth