Frederiksted and Christiansted are generally called “West End” and “Basse (Low) End.” Our view of Frederiksted from the vessel had prepared us for a beautiful place. It has some buildings with arched fronts and many white and pink and yellow houses, half-hidden among the strange tamarind and palm and mango trees, but when we got ashore the vision vanished. The arcades were clumsy and crumbling, the streets unpaved and irregular, and the cabins where the negroes lived were far from picturesque. They are built of wood and usually consist of one or two rooms, in which a large family is huddled at night. The people spend most of the daytime out of doors, and meals are prepared in the open air. There is no glass in the windows, and wooden shutters serve to keep out the wind and rain. Drives in the island of St. Croix over superb roads led us into valleys where there were tamarind trees, delicate-leaved as our locust, and giants called flamboyants, leafless but all aflame with scarlet flowers; and the silk cottonwood with enormous misshapen roots and long horizontal branches, on which grew a multitude of parasites and air plants. Here, too, was the curiously formed frangipani, with hooked or claw-like branches, and the banana tree, with clustering fruit and huge and cone-like blossom. Flowers of all colors and shapes, from the fragrant white jasmine to the yellow and red cacti, adorned the roadsides. Black pelicans floated on the sea, or sailed in long and continuous flight through the air; the groves were never without modest music from numbers of elegantly dressed birds, and innumerable brilliant butterflies harmonized in the beauty of their coloring with the superb flowers upon which they fed. From “Cruising Among the Caribbees,” by Charles Augustus Stoddard. * * * * * THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION ESTABLISHED FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF POPULAR INTEREST IN ART, LITERATURE, SCIENCE, HISTORY, NATURE AND TRAVEL THE MENTOR IS PUBLISHED TWICE A MONTH BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC., AT 114-116 EAST 16TH STREET, NEW YORK, N. Y. SUBSCRIPTION, FOUR DOLLARS A YEAR. FOREIGN POSTAGE 75 CENTS EXTRA. CANADIAN POSTAGE 50 CENTS EXTRA. SINGLE COPIES TWENTY CENTS. PRESIDENT, THOMAS H. BECK; VICE-PRESIDENT, WALTER P. TEN EYCK; SECRETARY, W. D. MOFFAT; TREASURER, J. S. CAMPBELL; ASSISTANT TREASURER AND ASSISTANT SECRETARY, H. A. CROWE. AUGUST 15th, 1918. VOLUME 6. NUMBER 13. Entered as second-class matter, March 10, 1913, at the post office at New York, N. Y., under the act of March 3, 1879. Copyright, 1918, by The Mentor Association, Inc. [Illustration: PHOTOGRAPH BY H. PETERSEN. FROM “VIRGIN ISLANDS OF THE U. S. A.” BY LUTHER K. ZABRISKIE. COURTESY B. P. PUTNAM’S SONS. ST. THOMAS HARBOR, VIRGIN ISLANDS--VIEW FROM THE FORT, BEFORE THE DANISH FLAG CAME DOWN] _THE VIRGIN ISLANDS_ _Early History_ ONE