Does this explain the desolate looking towns set amidst such fertile lands? There are poor. I saw them every day, but why they are so poor I do not know. All the civilised world is crying out for just such small products as the negro can supply, cold storage is the order of the day, why then are there any poor in Jamaica? Possibly a discreet knowledge of the growing powers of the soil is lacking, and also there is no doubt manual labour is despised. With whip and chain the white man taught the black--drove the thought into him with the branding iron--that manual labour was a despicable thing, something only to be undertaken by those who could do no better, and we cannot undo that teaching in a few years. Indeed it is only in the last few years, only since the cruel war which has made us all so wise, that Britain herself learned the lesson. I have always been keenly interested in openings for women, and inclined to be wrathful when other women talk as if matrimony were the only career for a woman. Of course matrimony is good for a woman, exactly as it is for a man, but I have always felt strongly that it is for the nation's good that every woman should go down into the arena and work for her living as a man does. If she marry--well--she will know better how to bring up her own sons and daughters, and if she do not marry--also well. She will have made a place for herself in the world, and can hold up her head as a valuable citizen. Feeling this strongly, it is no wonder that one of the most interesting happenings of my stay in Jamaica was my coming upon Charlotte Maxwell Hall, a young woman who is entering upon a career I should have loved at her age. She is young, extremely good looking, if she will allow me to say so, charming, and, above all, she is strenuous and vivid with energy--indomitable. She is the Government Meteorologist, and she is managing the cattle pen which her father bought forty years ago, long before she was born. She lives up at Kempshot, on top of the highest hill for miles round, which has one of the loveliest views in lovely Jamaica, and she is gradually working that 600 acres of rough hill country into a beautiful park, where the pastures are walled by stone walls as they are in Derbyshire or Northern China, walls built from the stones picked off the pastures, which must be put somewhere. She looks after her trees. She prunes; why should not shelter trees be kept beautifully, says she, and she takes every opportunity of planting trees from other lands. And as for her cattle, they are tended under her own eyes, and she wages unceasing war against that plague of Jamaica, the tick. [Illustration: 0320]