Not impressive as viewed from the water, the town is even less so when considered in the intimacy of its streets. An air of gray melancholy pervades it all. In 1907 an earthquake rent the town into fragments, and the work of rebuilding is but begun. Ruins confront you on every hand, the ruins of edifices that in their prime could have been nothing but commonplace, and in this day of their disaster have none of the dignity which we like to discover in mute memorials of a vanished past. Over all broods a dull, drab mantle of dust. The glorious trees, unexcelled in variety and vigor, have their richly varying hues dulled by the dust, so that you may not know how superb indeed is the coloring of leaf and flower except after one of the short sharp tropical rains that washes away the pall and sets the gutters roaring with a chocolate colored flood. [Illustration: JAMAICA, WHERE MOTORING IS GOOD] [Illustration: COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY F. E. WRIGHT DUKE STREET, KINGSTON, JAMAICA Beauty, dignity and pathos abide in the residence streets of the ancient colonial town. Hard times for sugar planters, even more than the earthquake, have cast a gloom over the community.] Making due allowance for the tropical vegetation and the multitudinous negro, there is much that is characteristically English about Kingston. The houses of the better class of people, however fragile in construction, stand somewhat back from the street, guarded by ponderous brick walls in order that the theory “every Englishman’s house is his castle” may be literally maintained. And each house has its name painted conspicuously on its gate posts. The names are emphatically English and their grandeur bears no apparent relation to the size of the edifice. Sometimes they reach into literature. I saw one six-room cottage labeled “Birnamwood,” but looked in vain about the neighborhood for Dunsinane. [Illustration: WOMEN ON THE WAY TO MARKET “The woman or the donkey furnishes transportation”]