About the huts, and amidst the plantations round the village, the black children played their Jamaican games with open-mouthed enthusiasm. The children of the country villages are not overburdened with unnecessary clothing and they are very strong and happy. By mixing with the little children one loses faith in the old belief that it is impossible to really civilise a coal-black nigger. The little ones differ from the white children only in the colour of their skins and the superiority of their physique. A negro child of two runs and laughs and plays as sturdily as does a London child of four. They have a little school of their own and a little church as well. Their one teacher is a lady of colour who lives well away from the village, but the parson is as black as the blackest among them. The teacher, who is a lady, wears eye-glasses; the parson affects spectacles heavily rimmed with yellow metal. On week days the people of the village, old and young, are very simple; on Sundays they are very religious. The women do more work than the men, though the men are not entirely given up to idleness. The women attend to the home life, the housework, and the nursing, and they tend the cultivation of the little family garden patch which supplies the family with yams and banana, and occasionally a little crop of luscious mangoes as well. The husband hires out his labour to the nearest planter and receives his wage of a shilling a day. He hoes the fields, sees to hedges, carries the water, drives the horses, or donkeys, or mules, or bullocks; gathers the ripened fruit, packs it for the market, and, when neither the planter nor the overseer is within eyeshot, idles away the time to his heart’s delight. The women are careful about their own adornment only on Sundays or those rare occasions when it is necessary for them to make the long journey into Kingston market. On week days they seem to wear whatever happened to come handiest when they were engaged in the act of dressing. The men wear long cotton drawers or the remains of heavy trousering, a very shady shirt, a battered yippo-yappo hat, and occasionally, an affair which undoubtedly at some remote period resembled a coat of the style affected by Europeans. [Illustration: SUNSET OVER THE HILLS] A FRAGMENT CHAPTER XXIII A FRAGMENT I went to tea with some people who were neither white, nor black, nor yellow. They were not half castes, not even quadroons. Octoroons they would be called if they were very poor. White they pass as, in the great house they live in. White they are to the few negro workmen they employ. I give the conversation, not because it is of interest, but to show the vernacular as voiced by the cultured octoroon. They were pleased to see us, and I had the impression that I was undergoing the pleasant sensation of being lionised--such was the warmth of my welcome. “You take sugar and milk?” I took milk.