FROMVECORDOV A EO “GALHA Yn

I had been recommended to the Resident Justice of the island, Captain
Maxwell Nairn, as one who would attend to my wants; but recent and danger-
ous illness had rendered him unable to oxtend to me the hospitality he would
surely otherwise have done, and I could not obtain even a room in which to sleep.
He and his family, however, were urgent in their endeavors to find me quarters,
and finally secured a room in the thatched hut of an old black woman, who
agreed to cook my meals. The stone walls of the apartment were white and
clean, and the thatch overhead was neatly fastened to the rafters, while the
old woman’s cooking was at least endurable. Captain Nairn’s was the only white
family on the island, the other six hundred inhabitants being black and colored.
The town consists of a few score huts and houses, an English church and a
Baptist chapel. One road ran across to a cen-
tral lagoon, a mile away, and a trail around the
island; but their great highway is the ocean,
their conveyances, boats and canoes. Watling’s
Island is egg-shaped ; it is about twelve miles
long, and from five to seven miles broad, with
great salt-water lagoons in the center, and is en-
tirely surrounded with dangerous reefs. Once,
it is believed, the coral rock, of which it is
entirely composed, supported a fertile soil; but.
at present the rock is entirely denuded, and the
only soil is found in pockets and depressions in
the surface.

A Bahama farm, in fact, whether it be found
in Nassau or Turk’s Island, is always a surprise
to one from the American States, because of its

RU ev Oni AT TTNC ea TTa De poverty. When the scant vegetation that covers

the coral rock is removed, there remains only

the white, glistening rock itself, gleaming out as bare and as devoid of plant life
as a marble monument.

But these naked rocks, so pitifully suggestive of poverty, the natives regard
with affectionate interest, and speak of them as their “farms.” The great.
drought of the past two years had deprived the farms of even the scant moisture
of ordinary years, and induced a general failure of crops throughout the island.

Although Watling’s Island lies just on the verge of the tropics, in latitude
twenty-four, yet its vegetation is by no means tropical in character, conveying
rather a hint of nearness to the mid-zone than actual fertility. Iam writing of
the vegetation presumably natural to the island, as seen in the woods and fields,
and not of the cultivated plants; for, indeed, all the fruits and vegetables of the
tropics can be raised here. But we no longer note the luxuriant vegetation
described by Columbus, who speaks of the orchards of trees, and of great forest