In the Kingston bazaars you can purchase walking-sticks for a shilling which in England would cost six times that sum, and the Kingston merchants make a profit on the transaction of more than five hundred per cent. Mr. Frank Bullen, whom I met in one of the Kingston hotels, told me that in the days when he was a seaman on a sailing ship, before he took to the trade of writing books, he once carried a cargo of walking-sticks from Kingston to England. I could not find any trace of the industry in the island to-day. But it should be a most profitable one. The Jamaican ebony or caccu-wood is one of the most beautiful woods one can imagine--a dark-coloured, close-grained heavy stick, which, common enough in Jamaica, is rare and valuable in England. And so it is with many other species. I have not mentioned the Jamaican ferns, yet the island contains almost every species known to the collector, from the tiny, dainty maidenhair to the giant tree-fern forty feet high. There is a deep ravine in the island so crowded with the refreshing greenness of a thousand varieties of the species of the cryptogram that the natives have named it Fern Gully. Here, and in the shadow of the mountain peaks, the fern collector can find every variety of his favoured plant. He can spend months in gathering and cataloguing, but he can never exhaust the resources of the island. [Illustration: A JOCKEY AT CUMBERLAND PEN, JAMAICA] A WEST INDIAN RACE-COURSE CHAPTER XXI A WEST INDIAN RACE-COURSE We drove to the race-course through a tropical heat haze. The narrow Jamaica lanes and the wider roads were stunned into reverberating silence by the power of the heavy sun. We drove through crazy scents, and the wild music of a million insects,--past banana clumps and patches and plantations, giant cotton-trees and creeping hedge flowers. We forded rivers and rattled across bridges, covering the parched beds of narrow streams. Often, from amidst the yellow greenery, the noise of our horses started a cloud of gaudy moths and painted butterflies. The John crows showed their ragged heads, red and blue, like raw meat baking slowly in the sun, above the dusty grey-black of their faded plumage. Even they found the sun too strong for exercise. So they slept after the manner of their kind, with one eye every watchful for prey or danger. We rattled along under long avenues of bamboo-trees, ungainly giants with feathered heads, unable even in the great heat to prevent the clicking of their hundred knees. The noise of bamboo clumps suggests the rattling of the bones of a shivering skeleton. The native people grinned us a holiday welcome as we drove along, and the animal life--draft oxen, decaying horses, cheery donkeys and saucy hogs--wondered at the foolishness of our hurry. We reached the paddock gate, and paid our entrance silver to a supercilious half-breed whose status was betokened by the brilliance of his necktie. Then through a green, well-timbered park, we reached the course.