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One home feature which the English have impressed upon the islands is good roads. The highways leading from Kingston up into the hills and across the island to Port Antonio and other places are models of road making. They are of the highest economic value, too, for in marketing farm products the one railroad is but little used. Nearly everything is brought from farm to market on the heads of the striding women, or in straw panniers slung over the backs of patient donkeys. Amazing are the loads these two patient beasts of burden—biped and quadruped—bear. Once in a while a yoke of oxen, or a one horse cart is seen, but in the main the woman or the donkey furnishes transportation. To the Jamaican there is nothing wrong with the verbiage of the Tenth Commandment to which our progressive women take violent exception. To him there is nothing anomalous in lumping in his or his neighbor’s wife with “his ox or his ass.” So the country roads on a market day are an unending panorama of human life, of women plodding to market—often a two days’ journey—with a long swinging stride, burden firmly poised on head, or returning with smaller loads gossiping and laughing with much gleaming of white teeth as the stranger passes. The roads are a paradise for automobilists—smooth, of gentle grade, with easy curves and winding through the most beautiful scenery of tropic hillsides and rushing waters. Only the all-pervading dust mars the motorists’ pleasure.


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