elsewhere, the population is almost entirely negro, forty
thousand blacks and a few hundred whites, the ratio altering every year
to white disadvantage. The old system has not, however, disappeared as
completely as in other places. There are still white planters with large
estates, which are not encumbered as in Barbadoes. They are struggling
along, discontented of course, but not wholly despondent. The chief
complaint is the somewhat weary one of the laziness of the blacks, who
they say will work only when they please, and are never fully awake
except at dinner time. I do not know that they have a right to expect
anything else from poor creatures whom the law calls human, but who to
them are only mechanical tools, not so manageable as tools ought to be,
with whom they have no acquaintance and no human relations, whose wages
are but twopence an hour and are diminished by fines at the arbitrary
pleasure of the overseer.

Life and hope and energy are the qualities most needed. When the troops
return there will be a change, and spirit may be put into them again.
Castries, the old French town, lies at the head of a deep inlet which
runs in among the mountains like a fiord. This is to be the future
coaling station. The mouth of the bay is narrow with a high projecting
'head' on either side of it, and can be easily and cheaply fortified.
There is little or no tide in these seas. There is depth of water
sufficient in the greater part of the harbour for line-of-battle ships
to anchor and turn, and the few coral shoals which would be in the way
are being torn up with dredging machines. The island has borrowed
seventy thousand pounds on Government security to prepare for the
dignity which awaits it and for the prosperity which is to follow.
There was real work actively going on, a rare and perhaps unexampled
phenomenon in the English West Indies.

We brought up alongside of a wharf to take in coal. It was a strange
scene; cocoa-nut palms growing incongruously out of coal stores, and
gorgeous flowering creepers climbing over the workmen's sheds. Volumes
of smoke rose out of the dredging engines and hovered over the town. We
had come back to French costume again; we had left the white dresses
behind at Barbadoes, and the people at Castries were bright as parrots
in crimsons and blues and greens; but fine colours looked oddly out of
place by the side of the grimy reproduction of England.

I went on shore and fell in with the engi