The most lovely girl I have ever seen in my life is a Creole with a little coloured blood in her veins. She has long brown hair, splendid dark eyes, white teeth, and a clear skin of pale brown that is soft as velvet. She is more than common tall, but so well proportioned that you do not think so until you see her beside some other woman. She is an athlete, she can ride, she can dance, and she can swim and dive like a fish. Truly a daughter of the Gods is she, and Jamaica may be proud of her. There are people who will say, “Yes, at nineteen, but these Creoles always go off, their beauty does not last. They grow old so soon.” Exactly the same was said of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The Creole who lives wisely, as women are beginning to live everywhere nowadays, is quite as likely to be good looking at forty, or even at sixty, I think, as the daughter of a cooler clime. Of course if she yield to indolence and do nothing but suck sweets or smoke cigarettes and sleep, why, the inevitable will happen. My daughter of the tropics is abounding in life. She owns a canoe, the _Dodo_, a little light boat, with which she can go skimming over the waters of Montego Bay. “I only take the children who can swim well,” says she, “and when I was younger, they won't let me now I'm grown up, we used to visit all the schooners and cutters that came into the bay.” The logwood schooners are manned by Norwegians, big fair men, who complimented her on her skill in managing a boat, and said she ought to have come from the North, “though why,” said she, “shouldn't a Creole sail a boat?” And there are big brown men from the Cayman Islands, descendants of the buccaneers, giants with the blood of all the nations of the world in their veins. They trade in salt. And men of all shades, from palest yellow to the blackest black, go dodging in and out of Jamaican ports, and one and all they carry on their bowsprits a shark's fin to make their little ships sail well. “But why,” I asked, “did you only take children who could swim?” “Because,” she laughed, “if you fall out of a canoe you can't get in again.” And she told me how on one occasion the laden canoe became extremely interested in an electric eel lying on the bottom, for the water of the bay is beautifully clear, and all rushed to one side to inspect. Over went the little craft, and then the biggest boy, aged I think 12, saw the danger and flung himself to the other side. He was just in time. The boat righted itself, but he lost his balance and fell into the water, with more than a mile to go before he reached the shore. No wonder young Diana insists that all her passengers should be able to swim well. There are some useful citizens growing up in Montego Bay for a nation that counts herself the ruler of the seas.