The population of the village, with the exception of two or three families, was composed of natives and half-whites of the lower class. Heathen superstition mingled with modern vice. In some instances men and women lived together without the ceremony of marriage. Beyond the village the cane-fields began, and beyond them, at the foot of the mountains, lived a better class of natives, moral and industrious. Here, too, were the cane-mills and the residences of the planters. I remember one pretty little cottage with walls of braided grass and wooden roof and floor, surrounded by cool, vine-shaded verandas. It stood in the middle of a cane-plantation, and was the home of an Englishman and his wife, both highly cultivated and genial, companionable people. He was a typical Englishman in appearance, stout and ruddy, and wore a blue flannel suit and the white head-covering worn by his countrymen in India. She was a graceful little creature with appealing dark eyes, and looked too frail to have ever borne hardship or cruelty, yet she had known little else all her early life. She had been left an orphan in England, and had been sent out to Australia to make her living as a governess. She was thrown among brutal, coarse-mannered people, and received harsh treatment and suffered many vicissitudes of fortune. Finally, her husband met and loved and married her, and lifted her out of that hard life into one which appeared by contrast a heaven of peace and kindness and affection. She often said frankly, "That was the happiest event of my life. I can never be thankful enough to him or love him enough. Sometimes I dream I am back again enduring that dreadful life in Australia, and when I wake and realize that I am here in our own little cottage, thousands of miles from Australia, I am freshly happy and grateful." Near the foot of the mountains was a Catholic church and a school, round which a little village had grown up. The self-sacrificing efforts of the teachers have been productive of good among the natives, but there seems little hope of any co-operation between the Protestant missionaries and them.