lace bark tree, whips whose butt and long plaited lash are both made from one piece of wood. She offers walking sticks of ebony, groo groo palm, pimento, bamboo, or cinnamon. Or if you prefer it, you can purchase a shark’s backbone mounted on a steel rod and fitted with a handle of scented sandal wood. This, the lady will tell you, is in England a great novelty, and surely worth five little dollars. Of course there is basket-work, and some pottery shaped out of red Caribbean clay. There are strings of coloured seeds and flower-pots made from wide bamboos. Gourds are carved and coloured and cut into useless shapes alleged to be ornamental, and cocoa-nuts are carved into men’s heads, the red hair left to make a frizzy beard. These, the lady says, are very fine. There are little gourds set on wooden skewers, and so formed into babies’ rattles. These the arch maiden sells to young men and maidens. Last of all, she produces dainty d’oyleys and table-centres and fine ornaments made from the lace bark-tree, and fashioned with ferns and pressed blossoms. These things cost a great deal of money, but as a rule they are very decorative. When you leave her stall, the lady pursues you for many yards with a mammoth lamp-shade, which, she assures you, will be greatly appreciated by your home folks. But the stall of the tourist caterer suggests artificiality. After all, the real market is under the vestibule of the great square building. Here are the native people with their pepper-pods and cocoa, their live fowls and jackass rope. The latter, be it understood, is tobacco. Sold in rope form at one penny or twopence per yard, the tobacco is called jackass rope, for what reason I could not discover. It is in this corner of the market-place that one meets the negro only. The woman minds the stall and does the selling, while the husband gossips with his fellows, or sips strong liquids at the rum bars. The anxious wife squats, nigger fashion, beside her heap of pepper-pods, and her hands play with them listlessly, just as we imagine a miser plays with his gold, until the heap is sold. She is patient and ladylike. The white man walks along her strip of market land, and she voices no light banter. If you ask questions as to her wares she answers with modesty and with intelligence. This is the country-woman, polite and unsophisticated. Beyond the department devoted to the sale of spices and pepper-pods and tobacco, we come to the chicken saleroom. Jamaican market-women nurse captive fowls just in the same manner as Englishwomen fondle lap-dogs. They stroke them and play with their feathers, open a wing to show the strength and youth of a bird, and hold the beak towards their face as if pleading with the doomed fowls for farewell kisses.