Ma Granman Abraham taki gi hem taki: Membre, mi pikien, taki, joe ben habi joe boen liebi datem, di joe ben de na grontapo, ma Lazarus ben habi wan ogri liebi: We, now hem kisi troostoe, ma joe de pina.

Much of the sermon I did not understand at all, or at most caught crudely the gist of it, as the resonant Teutonic voice boomed it forth in the lingua franca of the colony. But every now and then there rang forth a perfectly plain sentence in child-English, as when frequently the burly German took a step forward and, shaking his finger in the faces of his breathless congregation, cried out above the general jumble of sounds, “Yō no mussy do datty!”—which is good advice in any language.

A Dutch coastal steamer carried me in a night from Paramaribo to the second town of the colony, Nickerie, a hamlet of a thousand or more inhabitants just across the Corentyne River from British Guiana. It was a straggling line of coy white houses and a church spire, all of wood, stretching roomily along the river bank amid cocoanut and royal palms and a wealth of tropical greenery, not to mention humidity. Its sanded streets and roads were all raised, like dikes, for the coastal lands of both Dutch and British Guiana are below high-tide level, and must be empoldered, as in Holland, with a “back dam” also in most cases to keep out the rain-water from the interior. I strolled several miles up the river, past great swamps that make the region the paradise of mosquitoes and malaria, to say nothing of elephantiasis, to “Waterloo,”—not a battlefield, but a great sugar estate run by Englishmen. The first cutting—that of July—had begun, the principal one coming in September. The great cane-fields were being burned over, whether for snakes or merely to clear out the massed leaves was not apparent, clouds of leaden heavy smoke rising here and there across the immense light-green stretches flooded with sunshine and surmounted by a few lofty royal palms. Next negroes and Hindus attack the crop with “cutlasses,” tossing the canes in heaped-up rows along the edges of the canals, where they were loaded into barges drawn by mules and borne away toward the red stacks of sugar-mills looming somewhat hazily out of the blue and humid air. The transportation of both cane and the finished sugar is by these iron barges along the irrigation canals—of water as noisome as that before Benares. A little old English windjammer had come up the river to load sugar and to contrast with the Oriental aspect of the scene. A few English overseers rode big mules along the diked tow-paths, one of whom complained that they got less pay and fewer advantages here than over the border under their own flag. By noon I had returned to Nickerie, where I indulged in a shower-bath and a goodly dose of quinine, and retired from active life until the sun had lost some of its homicidal tendency; then strolled down the river to a cacao and cocoanut estate. Here a white déporté who had escaped from French Guiana was lugging a burden along the road with other outcasts. The Dutch, I recalled, rather than lower the standing of their race among their colored colonists, send home to Holland any white man sentenced to prison by the courts of Surinam. Under the cocoanut-trees sounded singsong Hindustani; old Hindu fakirs squatted beside reed-and-grass huts. A canal, with a gate to shut out the sea-water at high tide, stretched inland as far as the eye could see, a path on either side and frequent humped foot-bridges across it. I passed an open-air school in which a mulatto was teaching Dutch to the children of the plantation—with little effect, evidently, for they reverted to their native tongues or to “taki-taki” the instant they were dismissed. The distant sound of the half-mournful gamalong floating by on the languid evening breeze showed that a group of Javanese had already begun their night’s entertainment. People were fishing in the slime of the canals, and Hindus were bathing in them, no doubt finding them an excellent substitute for their holy Ganges. All in all, Surinam had proved the quaintest and most hospitable of all the Guianas, capable of producing a hundred fold what it does now.

The launch Ella finally left for Springlands, across the boundary, with nineteen persons, among whom I was the only white one, all packed in the forward cubbyhole with the steersman. For hours we plowed the yellow waters of the great mouth of the Corentyne, the dead-flat wooded shore frequently disappearing in island-like patches in the mirage of distance. Then some stacks and a cluster of buildings among trees grew toward us, and we anchored off a wooden wharf on which we were eventually landed in a clumsy rowboat. There we found ourselves inclosed in a kind of wooden cage, where a black policeman, with a pompous British air, and a pimply Chinese youth went through some formality about our names and previous condition of servitude, after which an Englishman eventually appeared, merely glancing at my modest bag, but carefully studying my passport—the only time I was ever asked to show a document I had spent much time and some money to get and have viséd in Pará for the three Guianas. Had any of the dozen delays been avoided, I should still have had plenty of time to catch the daily autobus westward along the coast; as it was, it still seemed possible. I coaxed a coolie boy under my bag and sped away, only to find that the bus no longer came to Springlands, but stopped four miles off, because the sea had washed out a strip of highway. A yellow negro with an imitation automobile called the “Star” offered to carry me to it for a small fortune, and in this we rattled out along a red country road, dodging innumerable negroes and Hindus, and producing an uproar like a locomotive off the track but still running at top speed—to come at last to the break in the road just in time to see the bus on the other side of it start twenty minutes ahead of its schedule.

To increase my geniality, I then discovered that the day was Saturday and that, being on British soil, there would be no bus on Sunday. Profanity being inadequate to the occasion, there was nothing to do but to get back into the automatic noise and return to town. This consisted mainly of an immense sugar estate called “Skeldon”; but the very British manager looked at me as at some curious and hitherto unknown species of fauna when I suggested that I spend the forty-eight hours on my hands in getting in touch with the sugar industry. Saturday afternoon market was in full swing, stretching for miles along the public highway in the blazing sunshine, for buying and selling is the chief sport of the laboring classes of the sugar estates on their weekly pay-day and half holiday. In the throng were noisy, impudent negroes of all tints in hectic garments, but they were overwhelmed by a flood of as many queer Hindu types, turbans, and female jewelry as could be found in the streets of Calcutta, with darker, tawnier Madrassee coolies as a sort of link between the two races. The latter were half-wild looking creatures, speaking Tamil, and were said to work better than the other Hindus, but to be spenders and gamblers, instead of penny-squeezers. Many of the goods displayed, almost entirely of foodstuffs, were the same as those in the markets of India, from coiled sweetmeats to curries. The coolies lived in clusters of one-story barracks, the negroes generally in makeshift wooden shacks, all joined by a foot-bridge over the flanking irrigation ditches to the highway and the huge mills, the stacks of which already seemed eagerly waiting to resume their labors on Monday morning.

An Anglicized Portuguese shopkeeper near “Skeldon” had a hotel at “64,” to which his servant drove me in a buggy, and then by automobile, along a reddish road of hard earth raised above the general level of the country. But I was the only guest in a long time, and the mammy-like old negress came up to inquire “what de gen’leman accustomed to eat” before she went away to catch and boil it. Moreover, I am not a good waiter, and with two days on my hands I decided to walk on next morning, perhaps to New Amsterdam, forty miles away. There was an excellent country road all day long through lowlands densely populated by East Indians and negroes in huts and houses always on stilts. Generally these had shingled walls and sheet-iron roofs, though now and then one saw a thatched mud hut that seemed to have been transported bodily from Iberian South America, and sometimes a shingle-sided house with a thatched roof, looking like a well-dressed man still wearing his old and shaggy winter cap. In places the villages were almost continuous, with bright red wooden police-stations every few miles occupied by lounging but fleckless negro policemen. Stone or cement mile-posts recorded my progress, and two telegraph wires constantly dogged my footsteps. Goats and donkeys were nearly as numerous as negroes and coolies. The highway itself was often crowded with traffic,—donkey-carts, many bicycles, countless people on foot, some automobiles. In all my tramping in South America I had almost never before had to dodge these curses of the pedestrian. One might have fancied oneself in the most populous parts of Europe. The latest census credited British Guiana with 304,089 inhabitants; it was plain to see why there were few left for the ninety per cent. of the colony back of this crowded coastal fringe. For all its British nationality, the vast majority of the country is not developed even as much as are such shiftless republics as Honduras, where at least one can telegraph anywhere.

Plainly, too, white men are not accustomed to tramp the roads of British Guiana. There was constant staring, with now and then an impudent remark from some negro, but for the most part there were unfailingly polite greetings. Yet I was handicapped by my color, which, as in all South America—with a few exceptions, such as Buenos Aires—marked me at a glance as of a race apart. Not only was I obliged to pay higher to keep from lodging in negro quarters or among Hindus, but silence fell on almost every group I approached, as if they feared I might hear their real thoughts. If I asked a question, I was instantly looked upon with such suspicion as might meet a detective in a dive of criminals. Not that I would change my color; but it would certainly have been an advantage to be able to disguise myself as a Hindu fakir or an African chief as easily as it is done in popular novels or the legends of famous travelers.

Worst of all, it was Sunday! I was “much humbugged” by the deep-blue tint of that day of the week in the stern Anglo-Saxon civilization I had almost forgotten, for the laws of British Guiana require shops of every description to remain hermetically sealed from eleven o’clock on Saturday evening to Monday morning. They were innumerable, the larger ones kept by Portuguese and Chinamen, as the unfailing name of the proprietor above the doors admitted, the smaller and more slatternly ones by negroes, and a few by Hindus. Plenty of “Licensed Retail Spirit Shops” announced themselves, yet I became ever more cotton-mouthed with thirst, for though the great mud flats on either side of the dike-like road were often lakes, it would probably have meant quick death to drink from them. The natives all drink rain-water, every house or hut of whatever size or material catching it off the roof in barrels or tanks; but these had a scent as of veritable Hindu uncleanliness. Finally I stirred up a negro lolling in a hut to break the Sabbath to the extent of climbing a cocoanut-tree, and drank three of the green nuts dry at a draught. The sun blazed maliciously, but there was a constant breeze from off the sea, which most of the day was so close at hand that I could hear the roar of the breakers and now and then catch a glimpse of it.

Hunger, too, soon discovered that it was Sunday. When I could endure it no longer I attacked the door of a closed shop and aroused the offspring of a Portuguese father and a negro mother, only to get an obdurate, “’Gainst de law, sah, to sell anything on de Sabbath.”

“Not against the law to starve to death though, eh?” I retorted, which extraordinary burst of wit so took his fancy that he exploded into a cackling laugh with, “Ah, no, indeed, sah, dat’s de fac’,” and finally became so mollified as to take me to dinner as an invited guest. It seems it is still permitted to have guests to dinner on Sunday. The meal we sat down to in his stilt-legged house across the way consisted of nothing but a large plate of boiled rice with a bit of fat pork in it, topped by a cup of hot goat’s milk, but King George’s dinner that day did not compare with it. My host would not eat with me, evidently for the same polite reason that had kept Langrey standing, though he asserted he could not eat hot food “because my tooth humbug me too much.” Paucity of vocabulary among not only the negroes but many of the whites born in the colony is astonishing and easily leads to errors. “Jes’ now,” for instance, may mean at once, an hour ago, or a day hence. “Humbug” serves for anything whatever of a detrimental character. “Don’ you let ’nybody make you a fool” is the usual form of that verb as we use it. The first question of a British Guiana negro to any stranger to whom he dares put one is almost certain to be “Your title, please, sah?” meaning, “What is your name?” and closely corresponding to the “Su gracia de usted?” of rural Spanish-America. The negro is the most imitative of human beings. In Brazil he has all the gestures and excitability of the Latin; here he talks with the motionless, solemn demeanor of the Anglo-Saxon. Before I left, my host told me that many detectives were sent out to catch shopkeepers breaking the closing law, and that, never having seen a white man walking the road before, he was still not sure I was not one of them. “An’ de fine ain’t a gill nor a half-bit either,” he added, in the peculiarly squeaky voice of his mongrel race.

The country grew a trifle wilder, with only negroes in the scattered huts, and swamps often stretching away on either side, full of tough sedge-grass whispering hoarsely together in the sea breeze. From mid-afternoon on the land was largely flooded. Rice-fields began on the landward side of the road, with a few grazing cattle on the seaside, and there were long rectangular plots of paddy in all stages from sprouting to nearly ripe. Coolies, who lived by the hundreds in huts bunched together on estates or on their own small farms, were pottering about in them. Some were freemen and others estate workmen who had been given a patch of ground on which to grow their own rice during their spare time. This practice is said to leave many plantations without sufficient laborers on Monday and even Tuesday, for the coolies, feigning sickness, stay home to rest up from their more earnest Sunday labor for themselves. Not being Christians, they are granted a certain immunity in Sabbath-breaking. Coolies, carrying along the road bundles of long, green rice pulled up by the roots for transplanting, greeted me with, “Salaam, sahib!” though “Mahnin’, sah!” was more likely to be that of the Hindu youths born in the colony, their glossy hair and complexions as startlingly out of place in European garb as fluent English of West Indian accent and vocabulary was on their lips. Residents of judgment seem to agree that the imported coolie is inferior to the creole.

I had walked twenty-five miles when I reached the immense sugar estate of “Port Mourant.” Besides its great mill with three stacks, there were the bungalow mansion of the manager, the somewhat less imposing bungalows of the assistant manager and the engineer, a big hospital on legs, the overseers’ barracks, several houses for lesser married employees, and a plethora of offices and smaller buildings scattered away through lawn and trees. Here, I suddenly recalled, I had a letter of introduction to the chief chemist, said to be a fellow-countryman, and I turned into the inclosure. His name was Bird, and he was rightly named. When I had sent the letter up to his residence on stilts and been allowed to stand waiting on the cement floor below stairs about half an hour, like any negro, a cadaverous individual came hobbling down. Handing me back my letter, a look of terror burst forth on his sour face when I hinted a desire to see a bit of the life on a sugar plantation, as if the terrible bourgeois fate of losing his job were already grasping him by the throat.

“I can’t do a thing for you!” he cried hastily, ignoring the fact that I had not asked him to do anything, and he quickly retreated. I was delighted to learn later that he was only a surcharged American after all.

Evidently there was some horrible mystery connected with the sugar plantations of British Guiana; perhaps it was some species of peonage. It was plainly my duty to find the cause of this overwhelming fear of strangers. I stalked across to the big two-story mansion on stilts in which the manager lived. After a second inspection the negro maid actually let me in, permitting me to take the stool nearest the door, and for the next half hour—the manager being in his “bawth”—contriving to pass frequently up or down the stairway at the back of the immense and well-furnished drawing-room to see that I did not get away with the piano or any of the popular novels. Some pretty little tow-headed children passed from the black nurse to the very English governess without being permitted to become acquainted, and at last the manager himself appeared. I had long known that the most painful experience in life is to introduce oneself to an Englishman, but I hold such occasional self-flagellation to be good for the soul. He was typical of the important, “well-bred” Britisher—though evidently Irish—and he descended upon me with the eat-’em-alive air of an attacking bulldog. But as I am least likely to run when most expected to, I sat tight. Unlike many of our own countrymen in positions of importance, or what they and the world consider such, the Britisher never seems to dare to risk loss of authority by even momentarily descending to human ways until he is sure he is not dealing with an “inferior.” The manager was not clear on that point in this case, but gradually it dawned upon him that he could neither shoot me on the spot nor have me dragged out, and once he had recovered from the dreadful feeling of having no precedent to go by, he began to act more like the human being and the tolerably good fellow he undoubtedly was way down underneath his job and his generations of steeping in caste rules. His voice diminished from that of an army officer ordering the immediate execution of a traitor to a tone befitting a drawing-room, and he finally sat down, though explaining that “under no circumstances” could he permit anyone to see the estate without an order from the owners—one of the principal business houses in the colony. Later, when I applied to them in town, they assured me that they never gave such orders, but left the matter entirely to the discretion of the managers on the estates—which was evidently the British form of “passing the buck” and pretending to be cordial while concealing that dreadful secret of Guianese sugar estates.

I rose to say that I would walk on to Berbice—and sleep in a ditch along the way, I might have added, for it was fifteen miles off and the sun was near setting—when a really human idea came to him. Summoning the head overseer, he told him to have the spare bed in the overseers’ barracks arranged for me, adding a more than plain hint that I be allowed to see nothing on the estate and that I be sped on my way as soon as possible in the morning. I was on the point of suggesting that I would not object to being blindfolded, when the manager’s wife appeared in gorgeous costume, followed by the “tea things,” and, there being no way out of it, I was asked to tea. This was a great advance, but I took far higher rank later, reaching almost the heights of a respectable person, when the manager remarked to the head overseer in the voice of a judge asking a lawyer who has specialized in that particular subject, “By Jove, I wonder if it isn’t late enough for the first swizzle?” The head overseer took the weighty question under consideration and at length decided that there was a precedent somewhere in British colonial history for starting the customary evening entertainment at that hour, whereupon a Hindu butler in gleaming white appeared with a yellowish mixture of whiskey base, which he whirled into a foam with a “swizzle-stick” made apparently of the root and stem of a small bush, the latter rolled rapidly between the hands, and served us in order of rank. This universal appetizer and eye-opener of British Guiana being over, the head overseer led the way to a long rambling building on legs, where a score of white Britishers, young or at most in early middle age, were already between merry and maudlin from the same cause.

Here we “swizzled” several times more, and then went in a body to a dining-room on the ground floor under the manager’s house, where fourteen of us sat down to dinner about a large table. The deputy manager was at the head and the head overseer at the foot; the rules of caste, of course, did not make it possible for them to eat with the manager. It was not a luxurious meal, though plentiful and most formal. During the course of it a ledger in which the manager, or his secretary, had written out each man’s orders for the next day passed from hand to hand. To an American, the rather faint and easily satisfied ambitions of these not particularly prepossessing young men was striking. They gave an impression of intellects of modest horse-power rarely speeded up into high gear, with slight interests or knowledge outside their routine work of bossing coolies in the fields, in which each had his particular task or section, without opportunity, or apparently desire, for personal initiative. Some of them might, indeed, almost have been suspected of light-mindedness, except on the one point of keeping up the good old English forms, prejudices, and social superstitions. Nearly all of them had come out on three-year contracts. If they remained five years, they got a six months’ trip home—at the company’s expense if and when they returned; after ten years as overseers the more clean-cut ones might become head overseers, and years later, deputy manager. Then, if the latter made no slips on the glabrous British social ladder, he might finally, in twenty or twenty-five years, work himself up into managerial timber, a rank at which there are few openings compared with the number who come out as overseers. The fixed rules of behavior were surprisingly paradoxical. The overseer might, and it was tacitly implied that he commonly did, “keep” a native woman—Hindus seemed to be preferred—without jeopardizing his ascent, so long as he made no public display of the fact; but he must not, of course, be without a dinner jacket and evening dress, or ride second-class, or do any of those other things which a Britisher of his class “simply doesn’t do, don’t you know.” Yet this distant and uncertain goal seemed quite sufficient incentive for these half-hearted chaps, many of them younger members of “best families” and “public school” men, to whom the vision of perhaps some day becoming manager of an estate, dwelling in the big bungalow amid servants and secretaries and with stern authority over everything in his immediate vicinity, seemed the nearest to paradise on earth to which men of their class could aspire. In keeping with their general point of view was the calm assurance, almost worthy of a Latin-American, with which they waited for “the government” to win the war, without ever dreaming of personally losing a meal or missing a “swizzle.” Contrasted with the strenuous exertions of the young Germans I had seen trying to get home from Brazil, the manner of these rather inane young gentlemen toward a conflict that was just then going heavily against them, yet of which they seemed almost as supremely indifferent and ignorant as of geography, was astonishing.

The overseers get up at five o’clock, meet for “coffee” and instructions from the manager, and at seven ride off on mules to their tasks, generally an hour or two from the plantation center. Here they spend a couple of hours superintending coolies, who for the most part work by the “task,” and ride back for tiffin, or breakfast, at eleven. They are out again at one o’clock, five days a week, and home soon after four, to have tea and play tennis, or to prepare for the coming gymkhana, the estate horse-races. There was a commodious billiard-room in the barracks, though apparently no shower-bath. No doubt each man kept his own private tub in captivity. All evening the head overseer was most formally obliging, but seemed in constant fear of my contravening the manager’s orders in some “cute Yankee” manner.

I was awakened at dawn by the Hindu “boy”—who was past forty—bringing me “coffee”—which was tea ruined by the addition of milk and sugar—and two diaphanous slices of bread. The autobus was not due for some hours, so I abandoned the contested territory as soon as possible and rambled away along the diked highway. There was somewhat less travel than the day before, but the shops were open. So cool and constant was the sea breeze that I did not have occasion to take off my coat during the whole fifteen miles, everywhere flanked by canebrake. Men in flowing robes or mere loin-cloths, with caste marks on their foreheads, coolie women with arms laden with silver bracelets, their thin and silky, though not always newly laundered, draperies wrapped gracefully about them, little Oriental temples standing out against the flat horizon, all carried the mind back to another land halfway around the globe. There was an amazing contrast between the lithe, slender Hindus in their loose garb, some of the younger girls almost beautiful, if one could overlook their nose-rings and a certain hereditary dread of soap, and the gross, rowdyish, tinsel-minded negresses. Yet though the East Indian was once civilized and the negro never has been, the result is in some ways astonishingly the same.

Coolies were “plowing” old cane-fields with pitchforks, their women, up to their waists in slime and water, were cleaning out trenches and irrigation ditches or turning up brush laid over newly sprouted shoots of cane. This lasted until ten in the morning, when a procession starting from the fields merged together and wended its way toward the center of the estate, the Hindus disappearing in long communal, barracks-like structures, the negroes squatting down to breakfast in the shade of their makeshift hovels. The latter were greatly in the minority, for they are prone to work a week and loaf two, or go to town to squander their earnings in gay garments and automobile rides at the height of the cutting season, and planters prefer the more dependable race. The first laborers brought over after the freeing of the slaves were Portuguese from the Madeira Islands. Then came the Chinese, generally without a repatriation clause in their contracts, so that they gradually drifted into shopkeeping, and to-day a few of them are among the big business men of the colony. Finally the great reservoir of British India was tapped, the coolies, male and female, coming out at government and plantation expense, indentured for five years and entitled to free passage home again. Many preferred to take a premium and remain, some to rehire, some to plant their own plots, a few to become men of importance, especially money-lenders with all the popular traits of the Jew. There is no question that the Hindu coolie is better off in British Guiana than he is at home, and that those born here are in a much more favorable condition; yet the call of the fatherland is strong in all races, and many return, taking with them enough to live in what to them is comfort. Considerably more than half the population of the colony are East Indians, but very recently all existing indentures were cancelled, the Indian Government having forbidden the signing of new ones some time before, and a scheme is now being worked out for Hindu immigration and colonization.

During all my walk I did not see a white man, except the sheltered ones at the estate. Many of the signs along the way were worth reading. “Dr. Moses Fraser, Dentist and Veterinary Surgeon” made it unnecessary to ask the “doctor’s” color. Ah Sing, Kandra Babu, and Percival Stuart Brathwaite kept shop side by side, the importance of their establishments decreasing in the order named. The autobus, resembling those along New York’s Riverside Drive, passed me on its outward trip; but if this packing above and below was typical, I preferred to walk. Here were the same silly caste rules as in the street-cars of Chile, and though it was infinitely finer on top, Englishmen had to swelter inside, because the imperiale was second-class and therefore given over to negroes and occasional Hindus. There were marsh birds by hundreds along the flooded flatlands, flocks of pinkish flamingoes now and then rising in flight. Before noon I had drifted into New Amsterdam, also known by the name of the county of which it is the seat, Berbice, second city of British Guiana and not much of a city at that. A chiefly negro population, though with many Hindus, completely swamped the rare whites, living in entirely shingled wooden bungalows amid luxuriant yards of palms and mango-trees.

From New Amsterdam there is a daily ferry and train to Georgetown, sixty miles away. To take the one across the River Berbice, distinctly wider than the Hudson at its mouth, in time to catch the other, meant early rising. For a time there was much bush along the track, the stations generally being mere stopping-places. Bananas, cassava, corn, and cocoanuts were the chief products. Then came Hindu men and women up to their knees in reeking mud, which discolors their ragged nether garments, setting out rice plants or kneading the soil about them. At Abary a group of Americans had established a big rice plantation and begun to work it by modern methods, but they were already in sad straits. The old-fashioned coolie hand-labor seems to be the only one offering sure returns. Here and there were rice-fields that had gone back to pasture, the light and dark grasses still showing where the paddy-dikes had been. As we neared Georgetown the rice plantations of independent East Indians became numerous, with oxen as well as men and women wading along in them, while the houses and sleek cattle showed prosperity, however biblical might be their methods of husbandry.

The settled portion of British Guiana extends from the west bank of the Essequibo River to the east bank of the Corentyne, two hundred miles distant, with a few islands at the mouth of the Essequibo and some ten miles up the Berbice and Demerara Rivers. Of the hundred thousand acres under cultivation—an area in proportion to the entire colony as is his forefinger to a human being—eighty per cent. is planted in sugar. A century ago the cultivation of cotton, coffee, and cacao gave way to this, and even alternating of crops is unknown. Year after year, often for half a century, sugar-cane has been produced on the same ground. Behind the plantations, which rarely extend more than three miles from the shore, the soil is a kind of peat, with here and there an island of sand. In front is the seashore or river, with its protection of almost impenetrable mangrove roots, then a dike with openings in it for irrigation ditches, the great wheel-operated gates of which are opened to let the water run out at low tide, but closed against the sea or river at their height, for salt on the land is fatal. Back of this dam is the public road, kept up at the expense of the plantation and, with the two canals beside it, constituting a second dike. Here is a mile-wide strip of land that is used as pasture, for the sugarmill, the manager’s house, overseers’ quarters, laborers’ villages, behind which, with a third dike, a draining engine, perhaps a little railway, and the “kokers,” or sluices to let out surplus water, are the interminable cane-fields, protected from the rainy season floods of the higher and uncultivated interior by a “back dam.” Canals are everywhere used for transportation—as well as irrigation—in iron punts drawn by mules. The secrecy which hangs like a pall over all of the estates, however, I never succeeded in penetrating. Perhaps it was merely to prevent some “clever Yankee” from learning how cane is turned into sugar!

Nickerie was once washed away by the sea, and Georgetown is saved from a like fate by a massive sea-wall. Down here where one must look up at the ocean the only way to fill a hole is by digging another, and there can be no real sewer-system where sewage would only float back into the city at high tide. Various systems are used for getting rid of Georgetown’s waste matter, none of them entirely satisfactory. Its water is brought in from the savannahs by the Lahama Canal, but this is yellow with vegetable matter and cannot be used for cooking, drinking, or even laundry purposes. Every building of any importance has a rain-water tank, some larger than those along our railroads, and as there is little dust or smoke in the city, water thus stored is clear and of good taste. Yet for all her natural handicaps, Georgetown is a comfortable and sightly city of wide, well-shaded streets, often with a canal flanked by rows of trees in the center, and broad green lawns so inviting after years of grassless Latin-America that I was tempted to sit on each of them in turn. From the sea-wall to the last negro shacks of the town is a distance of some two miles, with ample elbow-room and light wooden structures that make poor fire risks.

The city swarmed with hulking, ragged negroes leaning serenely against the many posters bearing the appeal “Your King and your Country need you. Enlist now!” In fact, it is unpleasant, at least for a white woman, to walk down Water Street among scores of ragged black loafers who seem to take pains to put themselves in one’s way. On the other hand, there are cheap public carriages, which, I suppose, would be the British reply to such a criticism. With plantains and eddoes plentiful, the mass of negroes are of lazier temperament than their ancestors, the slaves, who were forced to acquire the habit of work. They have so much power in the colony, however, that the man who must live there permanently cannot keep clear of them, and the visitor who inadvertently touches or even threatens some impudent lounger may be “summoned” and fined. It should be noted that in British colonies it is not so much the color-line as the caste-line which divides society. A man drops out of the highest class by having African blood in his veins, but so he does even when he is pure white for many other reasons, such as poverty or violation of any of the Englishman’s punctilios of social etiquette. Hindus are less in evidence in the capital than on plantations; Indians one almost never sees there. Every possible mixture of white, negro, Chinese, and East Indian may be found in the average crowd, however, though as a whole this has an Anglo-Saxon demeanor. Most of the pure whites are pale and thin, the women angular; even the young men are sallow from lack of exercise, manual labor being impossible and the principal gathering-place a “swizzle” club. The death rate is decreasing, but was still more than twice that of New York, thanks partly to the fact that even the English doctors in many cases still believed that “this mosquito theory is a lot of bally Yankee rot, don’t you know.”

The white population, exclusive of the Portuguese, who are not strictly so, own about three-fourths of the property, and the Portuguese much of the rest. Besides Chinese and unnaturalized Indians, there are 172,000 Hindus, nearly all of whom are alien or property-less non-voters. This leaves the few negroes owning property as the real rulers, to a limited degree, of the colony. In financial matters, including taxation, this is largely autonomous. The governor is sent out from England and is one of eight appointed members of the legislative Court of Policy; but there are also eight elective members, and the governor has the deciding vote only in case of a tie. Those who have had occasion to deal with it complain that the government is smothered in red tape. “If you wish to address the head of your department,” a man certainly in a position to know put it, “you write a letter to the next man above you, he adds a note and sends it on to the next, and so on up ten, or a dozen, or a score of rungs of the official ladder, and the answer comes down again the same way, so that when you get it back you buy a trunk and pack the stuff away and save it to read during your vacation.”

But there are excellences in British government which offset some of its precedent- and caste-loving stupidities. I went one day with the deputy head of the Department of Lands and Mines, who is also “Protector of the Indians,” to the recently established “Aboriginal Indian Depot.” The aborigines are a simple, good-natured people whose chief fault is a liking for rum, and not only do none of them live in town, but they cannot cope with urban dangers during their rare visits there. Principally by the use of liquor, laws to the contrary notwithstanding, the riffraff of Georgetown made it their business to rob the Indian men and lead the Indian women astray whenever they came to town; now the visitors have an official refuge, surrounded by a sheet-iron wall, which no outsider may enter without formal permission. There are one long and two short rooms extending the length of the building, and the Indians had swung their indispensable, home-woven hammocks side by side, just as they do in their own wilderness shelters. The large room was for ordinary Indian men, one of the smaller ones for married couples, and the third for “captains,” certified river-pilots, and other personages of importance—for your Englishman never forgets caste, even among aboriginal tribes. Here any Indian has the right, and is expected, to come and stay, free of expense, while in Georgetown, buying his own food and cooking it himself in a simple kitchen behind the building. The Depot was erected with funds accruing from “balata” gathered by the Indians, one-third of which is turned into the colonial treasury and the rest into an Indian reserve fund for just such purposes.

Not only in her grassy lawns and wooden houses, her stern morality and her altruistic treatment of the aborigines, does Georgetown remind the Anglo-Saxon wanderer that the differences between his own and Latin-American civilization are many, significant as well as trivial. Here he will find again that love of nature, or of outdoors, which is so slight in the rest of South America. By seven in the morning even the well-to-do are parading the sea-wall. Though there is no lack of carriages and automobiles, all classes go much on foot—the mere sight of well-dressed people habitually walking seems strange to the man more familiar with the rest of the continent. Latin-Americans of that class may stroll up and down a fashionable promenade of a block or two at a certain hour of the evening, but it will be rather to indulge in mutual admiration than for exercise. Here one will see again, with a start of surprise, white women not only abroad at an early hour, but pushing baby-carriages. In all the rest of South America it would be unseemly for a lady to pass her threshold in the morning, except to go to church and possibly to shop, or to be fully dressed and powdered before mid-afternoon, and even if she knew of the existence of perambulators, she certainly would not condescend to propel one herself. Another English touch is the sight of all classes riding bicycles, from the negro postman to dainty, veiled young white ladies—conduct which would be instantly ruinous to any feminine reputation elsewhere on the continent. People no longer hiss to attract attention; one is no longer a sight to be stared at from one end of the street to the other; no human wrecks come pestering one to buy sudden fortune in the form of a dirty rag of a lottery ticket; money is worth its face value again and is accepted at that rate without question—even though the newcomer may get hopelessly entangled in a confusion of reckonings in shillings, dollars, cents, and pence. It is true that traffic turns to the left and that audiences sit stiff and motionless as wooden images at band concerts, but this little patch of England in South America has fine big school buildings, instead of droning choruses of children packed together in noisome old hovels. Where there are many negroes there are apt to be beggars, but they are by no means so numerous and certainly not so pestiferous in Demerara as in Brazil. The street-cars are not divided into classes, and one may ride irrespective of the shape or condition of one’s collar; though castes are recognized in a different way, for the negro-Hindu motormen and conductors, speaking what is fondly supposed in the West Indies to be English, have a different vocabulary for each class. To a black fellow-laborer they say in a kindly, familiar tone, “Get off, mahn; heah yo street;” to a negro market-woman, impatiently, “All right, get on, ef yo goin’!” but to a white man of any standing, in a totally different tone and timbre, “Oh, yes, sir; this street, sir; all right, thank you, sir.”

Indians of many tribes, negroes wild and tame, Hindus, Madrassees, Javanese, “taki-taki,” French déportés, tropical Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Englishmen, Chinese, Portuguese, and chaotic mixtures of all of these—one could spend a life-time in the three Guianas. Many a Frenchman has in the smallest of them. The Pilgrim Fathers first planned to come to Guiana; it would be interesting to see how different their descendants would be now. The population of this bit of Europe in South America resembles the favorite dish of the British section of it,—the “pepper-pot.” To make a “pepper-pot” one throws into a huge kettle beef, mutton, fish, fowl, and anything else that will cook which turns up during the week, adding from time to time a dash of salt and many native peppers, letting it all stew for days, until it results in an effective but indistinguishable concoction. The time may come when the unadulterated white man will recognize what looks like a dot on the map as a part of his heritage, particularly the great elevated wilderness and savannahs back of the motley-peopled seacoast. My latest letter from Hart talks of cattle by thousands of head, and reports the completion of a cattle trail forty feet wide, though with all large trees left standing, from Melville’s on the Dadanawa to within reach of Georgetown. In such a land it is nip and tuck now as to whether the railroad or the automobile will take first place in a development that is certain to come in the not far distant future.