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Making due allowance for the tropical vegetation and the multitudinous negro, there is much that is characteristically English about Kingston. The houses of the better class of people, however fragile in construction, stand somewhat back from the street, guarded by ponderous brick walls in order that the theory “every Englishman’s house is his castle” may be literally maintained. And each house has its name painted conspicuously on its gate posts. The names are emphatically English and their grandeur bears no apparent relation to the size of the edifice. Sometimes they reach into literature. I saw one six-room cottage labeled “Birnamwood,” but looked in vain about the neighborhood for Dunsinane.

WOMEN ON THE WAY TO MARKET

“The woman or the donkey furnishes transportation”

The town boasts a race course, and the triple pillars of English social life, cricket, lawn tennis and afternoon tea, are much in evidence. The Governor is always an Englishman and his home government, which never does things by halves, furnishes him with a stately official residence and a salary of £5000 a year. The Episcopal Archbishop of the West Indies resident there is an Englishman. But most of the heads of official departments are Jamaicans, which is quite as it should be, for out of the 850,000 people in the island only about 1660, according to the census of 1911, were born in England, Scotland or Ireland. Furthermore the number of “men from home” is relatively decreasing, although their influence is still potent. Even the native Jamaican of the more cultivated class speaks of England as home, and as a rule he spends his holidays there. Yet the keenest observers declare that the individual Englishman in Jamaica always remains much of a stranger to the native people. He is not as adaptable even as the American, and it is asserted that American influence in the island grows even as British domination is weakened.