dine out in the bungalows of older inhabitants. The readiness with which the soldier is prepared to part with meat rations is proof that flesh foods are an unnecessary luxury for the West Indian native. The negroes of the island are sharply divided into [Illustration: A MILKMAID, BARBADOES] two classes: those who live in the towns, and the country labourers. The two classes differ as much as do English agriculturists and Londoners. In Jamaica the country people are superior to the town-bred class. The influences of town life are not good for emotional people whose fathers’ fathers hunted men in the forest lands of Western Africa. They receive impressions too easily. They are impressed by the bad as well as by the good. A black servant is always his own idea of his white master. A black man must imitate; his race has only just come in contact with civilisation. Instinctively he imitates because he has not yet reached that state which some day may enable him to initiate. If he is to appear in the guise of a civilised man he must follow; his experience is not great enough to enable him to lead; his instincts are still African and barbarian. So the town man, subject to the influences of a city in which live types of every class of every European race, is necessarily at a disadvantage compared with the man who lives with nature among people of his own colour and only one or two white men of one race. The dwellers in the Jamaican cities look down upon the country folk as unsophisticated nonentities. The country people imagine the townsmen to be priests of iniquity, cunning, and steeped in wickedness. Just as it is in England, only more so. In the country all the coloured people are, approximately, of one class; they all belong to one station. In towns the buggyman looks down upon the costermonger as an inferior, just as the wives of shopkeepers ignore the existence of Mrs. Buggyman. In imitation of the English, foolish class distinction has given birth to a form of snobbishness which is entirely ludicrous. In Kingston the outward and visible sign of prosperity or social superiority is shown in the costume of the women-folk, and in the simpering accent of the maidens. The more uncomfortable a woman looks when she goes on church parade, the more diffidence she shows before opening her mouth to answer a simple question, the higher she is in the social scale, as it is understood by native Jamaicans. This is as it is among the shopkeepers and the proprietors of buggy horses and worn-out four-wheel tourist conveyances. With the workers it is altogether different. The aged lady, who sits for twelve hours of every day selling gingerbread beneath the half-shade of a decaying arch fronting an important shop in the main street, thinks little of costume and nothing of accent. She is persuaded to talk with great difficulty, though her story would be really interesting. An old black lady lacks that venerable appearance peculiar to the aged dames of England.