This was a Pandora’s, not a Christmas box. I wonder that all the inhabitants are not like the mad woman who rushed out of the insane asylum howling at us as we entered Castries harbor. St. Lucia was a martyred maid in the time of Diocletian, and lost her money and her eyes. The island bearing her name has suffered outrage and martyrdom and may well invoke her as the patroness of the poor and blind, for its inhabitants are afflicted with poverty and eye disease. The land-locked harbor is the military key to the West Indies. Morne and Vigie are striking fortifications, and historic hill-tops in the back-ground have been bathed in the blood of those climbing the Calvary of death. They were drenched in mist and rain when we docked. Coal and not carnage is the leading industry now. Instead of shambles, all is soot. Ships come for fuel, not to fight. As at Nagasaki, Jamaica, St. Thomas and Martinique, women do the coaling. In place of Kingley’s poem, “Men must work and women must weep,” it is, “women must work and men must sleep.” The coal wenches are amazing Amazons. How they wiggled and waltzed with coal-baskets on their heads, sweating, swearing, singing snatches of French songs and swaying to the music of a carnival band that came down to the boat and acted like madcap strolling players standing on heads and hands. The girls made a few cents a basket; if one greedily ran ahead out of turn, there was a “switchman” to lash her back in line. What coal-black Caryatides! Wonderful models—not of manners or morality—but muscles that would give a sculptor fits. Sure Mike Angelo would have wrestled with them, but Ben Cellini would have thought twice before he dared throw them about as he did his model whom he grabbed by the hair, kicked and mauled so she was compelled to anoint her wounds with bacon fat while he stood around and “larfed.” These husky, dusky damsels would have brained him with a lump of coal, thrown him in the sea, or mopped up the island with him. This holiday work gave the begrimed beauties extra money. They like work and carry their burdens on, not in their heads, the baskets often weighing 150 pounds each.