The history of Jamaica he knows not, he says, neither can he tell us why some people are black and some white. Best of all is to be brown, “like me,” he says; then one is black to the black people, and white to the white. Really it is a wise thirteen-year-old, witness the postscript. “I should pass as white in England, but not here. Too many nearly white here, sah.” He likes the black people best because they are “plenty more happier,” but the money is in the hands of the whites. When he is old he will catch fish and live alone in a house with his wife and children. If ever he should tire of fishing, Jamaica is “plenty full of fruit.” A little work would be necessary, perhaps, but he does not mind work. Witness the time he spends in practising diving in the Kingston bay, he says. Women will do his housework and attend to his fruit patch; his wife will see to the clothes of his children. Yes, perhaps it would be good to go out to the sea in big ships, and find adventure in lands beyond the colour line of the setting sun. But in the big ships there is little fruit, and women are not at hand to wait on men. No, it is better to remain where people are safe. Sometimes the big ships go away and never return. The reason is that some one on board has sinned in the eyes of God. Yes, everyone sins plenty often, but God is kind and shuts His eye, otherwise every living man and woman would be blasted dead. Women are not so important as men. We tell them they are, because it pleases them, and so they do more work. But really it is better to be a man. Women are weak and little in their minds, they are too much afraid, and too little given to thinking of big things. You must be kind, but not too kind, to a woman. If you are too kind, she will think you weak and foolish, and she will do no work for you. Yes, he loved his mother and his sisters, but he loved his father most of all, because he was big and strong, and fished in the bay even when the weather was very rough. His father only laughed and cuffed him when he stole the bananas from the cart in the market-place, but his mother talked of it for days, and told all the neighbours that he was a thief and a bad boy; and she told the parson man, who at any moment might tell God. Then he would be sent to hell, all for one or two bananas. His father was angry with his mother for telling the people, and his mother cuffed him still, because his father had beaten her for telling people his son was a thief.