I could wish that the schools were better equipped, for the negro patois, amusing as it is, is still but patois, and though negro voices can be soft and pleasant, often I have heard them talking among themselves with very ugly intonations indeed. And yet it is a shame to complain, for though it is delightful to live amidst lovely scenery, it is always the people who add piquancy to life. And the Jamaican peasant was always adding to my joy. He didn't mean to do it. It was when he was most natural I got the best results. On Kempshot Pen one day the head man came reporting that the men had--like men all over the world--struck for higher wages. But they chose the wrong time. Their mistress could do without them, and she did. “Tell them,” she said, “they can go. I can manage.” And they set out to enjoy themselves. About an hour later she was aroused by a loud wailing, and in burst a man with his eyes starting out of his head and the lower part of his face a bloody pulp. She did not recognise one of her own men, and he could only gug--gug--gug, and splutter blood and broken teeth. But there were two shamefaced men at the gate who looked as if they had broken all the commandments, and expected to be well beaten for it. “It was Victor,” they explained. “Victor!” Then they told the story. As they were on strike Victor had decided to go shooting. But his gun, an old muzzle-loading affair, declined to go off. He proceeded to investigate and blew down the barrel, while another man kindly applied a fire stick to the touch-hole. The matter was settled in half a second, and he received most of a charge of small shot in the lower part of his face. It looked horrible enough, but it wasn't as bad as it might have been, for either the powder was damp or he had been economical with it. But his wounds were far beyond all simple household skill, and his mistress could only pack him off on a donkey to the doctor in the town below. An open-air life and a vegetable diet is apparently good for the healing of gun-shot wounds, for long before we expected him, Victor was back again, but slightly scarred and smiling. He was quite well, he explained, and had only lost “a toof or two.” The doctor said he had taken away half his upper jaw, but as he didn't know he had an upper jaw that didn't trouble him. Meanwhile at the time of the accident the head man had improved the occasion. “See what happen to Victor when you no work,” said he, and every man jack came back to work without a word about the extra money they had felt they could not do without, and worked so well that the surprised pen owner found she had three days' work done in one.