The Jamaican negro usually does not have his plantation round his home. As in the old slave days he has it at some distance away, often so far that he must needs stay there at night to guard it. The idea, I believe, is that he saves the land round his home for the time when his legs shall be too old to carry him to a great distance. Still, round the shack itself may often be seen the poles supporting the green vines of yams, and often there is a breadfruit tree, its leafy arms stretching out hospitably, its handsome leaves glimmering and glinting in the sunshine, and in the season when it is well grown its fruit will support a village. He probably also has a few bananas or plantains, and there is sometimes a primitive mill, with a blindfolded mule going slowly round and round, crushing the cane for the coarse head sugar that the black man loves. There are some hens scratching happily, for there is plenty for a hen to eat, a goat or two is tethered on a patch of grass, for the children want milk, and there is a pig, the only animal the negro feels bound to feed. He grows yams and corn and cocos for his hog, but his poor mongrel dog is so starved as a rule (I have seen brilliant exceptions), it makes your heart ache. When we lived at the Hyde, the mongrel dogs belonging to the “Busha” and some of the labourers were the plague of our lives. They were always ranging the place in search of scraps. On one occasion we did remonstrate as forcibly as we dared with a black man who owned an unfortunate starving puppy whose bones stood out of its skin, and the next day the poor brute arrived, starved as ever, with a bleeding stump where its tail should have been. On its heels came its angry master. And we were also angry. “I dun all me can, missus,” he explained. “He will come. Me cut off him tail an' burry him an' tie him on top. It sure ting him stay wid him tail but him bruck de 'tring.” Poor things! Poor things! The sufferings of the dogs and indeed of all animals in Jamaica at the hands of unthinking black men! A self-contained establishment is the Jamaican shack. Sometimes it is built of wattle, as the huts to-day are built on the Gambia, whence came the Mandingo slaves, sometimes mud is daubed on the wattle, as it is on the Gold Coast, sometimes it is built of rough logs and it is thatched with palm leaves, or, as the family rises in the social scale, with shingle. In it apparently dwell a large family, ranging from the old granny whose age no man knoweth, to the new-born baby of her great grand-daughter, a baby born into a new world where life I know will be easier for it and hold more advantages than it did for the old woman who sits nodding in the shade. Perhaps the hut belongs to her. It often seemed to me that the hut did belong to the women, even as they do in the country from which they came.