In the first place, as I have said before, the South is deeply and earnestly religious. The Churches are all opposed to the liquor traffic, and it has been said that “a proposition to restore it would encounter from them almost the same reception as a proposition to restore a State Church establishment.”

In the second place, the presence of the negro in the South is a tower of strength to the prohibitionist.

In the third place, the rapid industrial revival of the South is making men alive to the economic waste involved in the liquor traffic.

In the fourth place, prohibition has touched the patriotic imagination of the South, which is a very lively faculty indeed.

On this subject I spoke to Dr. E. A. Alderman, President of the University of Virginia. In that State local option has banished the saloon from almost all the country districts and from most of the towns. Charlottesville, the seat of the University, is, according to Dr. Alderman, distinctly a better town since it “went dry.” Manners are better, the standard of comfort is higher, there is more money to spend.

“It seems to me,” said Dr. Alderman, “that society has an absolute right to protect itself against the evils of alcohol, just as it has the right to take compulsory measures of sanitation. Whether the best method of protection has as yet been reached, I won’t undertake to say. But I think you may safely assume that in the Southern States the age of the open grog-shop is past.”

Wherever I went in the South, one invariable experience awaited me, of which I scarcely know how to write. A buggy was ordered out, and I was trotted round to visit six or eight negro “homes.” I came to regard it as an established ritual, and learned to use the responses expected of me.

It would be base and stupid were I to laugh at these simple people who, in all good faith, and with a touching pride, which one felt to be more racial than personal, displayed to me their household gods. As a rule, indeed, I felt much more inclined to weep than to laugh. And yet, in one aspect, the parade was irresistibly ludicrous. It was as though one were led from window to window in Tottenham Court Road and asked to read, in the dining-room, drawing-room, and bedroom “suites,” the capacity of the British people for culture and civilization.

The point, of course, was to show what progress the coloured race had made, in wealth, education, and refinement, during the forty years which had elapsed since their emancipation. Statistics on this point, as we have seen, are apt to be a little deceptive. It is generally assumed that, after the Civil War, the race as a whole started in absolute pauperism. But this is not the fact. There were at that time many free negroes, and not a few who possessed a good deal of property.^[43] Thus the well-to-do, “home”-owning class of negroes is not entirely a creation of the past forty years. In Charleston, for instance, there were a good many negro slave-holders before the war; and I was told (though for this I should not like to vouch) that negro property-owners are now fewer in that city than they had once been, many of the younger generation having dissipated the savings of their elders. I may add that by far the most homelike of the homes I visited belonged to a professional man who could not truly be said to have risen from slavery.

Nevertheless, the evidence of thrift and material prosperity among a considerable class of negroes is undeniable and very striking. As I was driven from home to home, other homes and institutions were pointed out to me, with details as to the number of dollars they represented, until my head swam, and I began to wonder whether I were not back among the Vanderbilts and Goulds in Fifth Avenue. For when you get well up among the tens of thousands, my power of grasping and comparing numbers very soon fails me.

“The greater part of this street here to the left belongs to the richest man in our community. He pays taxes on half a million dollars.” “There are three or four homes in this street belonging to coloured people worth from 25,000 to 75,000 dollars.” “That is an infirmary for negroes donated by a carpenter who couldn’t read or write. It cost 50,000 dollars. It is supported by various coloured clubs, with contributions from the county and the city.” Such was the unvaried strain as the buggy rattled along.

But one thing I noticed with interest—my coloured cicerones were just as ready to point with pride to the fine residences and institutions of white men as to the homes of their own people. Whatever their grounds of complaint against the other race, they were, so far as they were suffered to be, loyal citizens of their State.

To one negro Crœsus I was personally introduced, and an interesting type he was. |A Coloured Carnegie.| An old man—well on in the sixties, I should say. He had no negro traits that I could discover, and his complexion was the very lightest yellow. His shrewd, many-wrinkled, crab-apple face would have been remarked in Europe as distinctly American, but he would scarcely have been suspected of black blood. In one respect he was ostentatiously millionairish, for every tooth in his head was of gold. Moreover, he wore in his shirt front a splendid diamond pin, which contrasted oddly with his otherwise plain and even rustic attire.

He is a banker, a general trader, an owner of real estate—and a liberal benefactor to his own people. He has established in the negro quarter of the city where he lives a sort of garden and recreation-ground for his race, which is all the more appreciated, as negroes, even when not formally excluded from the public parks, are made very unwelcome in them. In the recreation ground is a plain but well-designed and commodious wooden theatre, where companies of negro actors frequently appear. I am told there is a remarkable development of negro theatrical art in several quarters, but was not fortunate enough to come across any specimens of it.

The keen little walnut-skinned Carnegie-Chrysostom accompanied my guide and me over the garden and theatre. He said very little, but he gleamed appreciation of my guide’s remarks, all tending to impress on me his manifold activities, his astuteness, his success, and his beneficence. Yet one did not feel, as one would have felt had a white millionaire been concerned, that the poorer man was guilty of adulation, the richer of ostentation. There was something impersonal about it all. It was not the men but the race who boasted. The hero of the song of praise was not “I,” nor “he,” but “we.”

And what, now, of the “homes” themselves? |Villa Residences.| Those that I saw were without exception what are called by English house-agents suburban villa residences, which would command, in the neighbourhood of London, rents of from £40 to £70 a year. They were very nice little houses, scrupulously neat and well kept. They had (to my mind) the advantage over English houses of the same class, in the sense of spaciousness which comes with steam-heat and the consequent absence of doors. In some the doorways were filled with bead curtains—hanging strings of glass beads—which seem to be very popular just now in coloured society.

The furniture was always modern and in excellent condition, with a great deal of plush about it. Much of it conveyed the impression (not uncommon in English villa residences) of being intended rather for show than use. The wall-papers ran to large patterns, and were apt to be sombre in tint. Every home, without exception, had its piano, sometimes with open music on it. In the matter of pictures, nicknacks, etc., there was no affectation of “culture.” Æstheticism—that “unanimity of æsthetic appreciations” which so troubled Mr. Wells in Boston—has not yet penetrated the negro home. I did not see a single Wingless Victory. The works of art are simple to the point of primitiveness, and pleasing in so far as they genuinely represent the taste of their owners. One handsomely furnished parlour stands out in my memory, in which a showy overmantel was flanked by two amazing glass transparencies in heavy gilt frames, one representing a moonlit landscape and the other the Houses of Parliament and Clock Tower at Westminster.

As a rule, I would be received by the lady of the house (her husband was apt to be away at business) with the stock phrases of American politeness. In the great majority of cases the lady would be a quadroon, or lighter; and in one or two instances I fancy nature had been assisted by a whiff of the powder-puff. My inspection generally stopped short at the living-rooms on the ground floor; but sometimes I was admitted to regions of more intimate domesticity. It was embarrassing; it was ludicrous; it was, above all, pathetic.

With people of a corresponding class in England the first impulse would have been to offer a visitor “refreshment” of some sort. Never once was there a hint of anything of the kind on the part of my negro hosts. I wondered, and am still wondering, whether it simply was not the custom of the country, or whether they imagined that I would scruple to eat or drink with them.^[44]

Though I did not partake of their bread and salt, I have a sense of perfidy in thus criticizing the interiors in which they took such a simple pride. |Resolute Refinement.| But, after all, I was there for no other purpose than to report what I saw and felt. What I felt, then, was certainly admiration for the thrift and progressiveness which were apparent on every hand; nor was it the unsophisticated order of taste displayed in furniture and adornment that qualified my admiration. Far be it from me to attribute any absolute superiority to the standards of Brixton, or even of Boston. What troubled me throughout my domiciliary visits was the sense that (with one or two exceptions) these homes were not homes at all. I do not doubt that each roof sheltered a home; but I do not believe that the prim parlours I saw had any essential connection with it. They were no more homelike than the shopwindow rooms of the up-to-date upholsterer. If they were lived in at all, it was from a sense of duty, a self-conscious effort after a life of “refinement.” They were, in short, entirely imitative and mechanical tributes to the American ideal of the prosperous, cultivated home. I could find in them no real expression of the individuality of their inhabitants.

Let it be remembered, however, that this is the first generation of negro prosperity. Will the second or third generation really assimilate the American ideal, or develop a “refined” domesticity of its own?

A remark of my guide on one of these expeditions summed up the phase of culture as I saw it. “We have a little whist club in our set,” he saidsaid. “We meet and play once a month. But the best part of it is the good dinner at the end of the season.”

The whist club, so frankly characterized, guided me to the word I had been searching for in the back of my mind through all these experiences. It was the word “veneer.”

A very different class of negro was represented in the congregation of the only church which I had an opportunity of attending.

It was an African Methodist church—a spacious, airy building, capable, I should think, of seating some 2000 people. It was not full, but fairly well attended; and black, as distinct from brown or yellow, was the prevailing complexion. Every one was quite decently dressed, some of the women in gaudy colours, but many of them, too, in black. The gaudiest colours were in the awful stained-glass windows, which seemed to be made of salvage from the wreck of a cheap kaleidoscope. Two pastors sat on a platform at the end of the hall. There were flowers on a table before them; and, as it was a sweltering morning, each of them held a fan.

The whole service was conducted by one of them, a man of rather Caucasian features, but of dark-brown tint. In the hymn-singing there was nothing peculiar—it was fairly spirited and good. But after the first few sentences of the prayer, ejaculations began to break forth. Their precise meaning, if they had any, I did not catch. They seemed to me like “Yes, oh yes!” They ought, according to the best authorities, to have been “Hallelujah!” “Praise de Lord!” and such phrases; but I certainly did not distinguish them. And presently they grew quite inarticulate, passing over into wails, moans, and now and then a sort of wild, maniac laughing and yodelling.

And the whole sermon, after the first five minutes, was accompanied by similar manifestations. The text was, “Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I have heard many worse sermons than this competent, fluent, popular discourse, which consisted mainly of an exposition of the overpowering strength of the metaphor of “hunger and thirst.” “We may credit our backs,” said the preacher, “but we must pay our stomachs; we can put the back off, but we can’t put off the stomach.” (“Yes, oh yes!” shouts, moans, and wails.) “No doubt most of you, before you came here, have had a good drink of coffee or tea; but how many of you have had a real good drink from the fountain of everlasting life?” (Confused sounds not unlike the yelpings of a large kennel.) “If some of you didn’t eat and drink more physically than you do spiritually, you’d be skeletons. That’s plain talk.” (Shrieks, wails, and yodelling.) “Some of you good sisters are so anxious to get your people’s breakfasses that you have no time to ask a blessing on the work of the day.” (“Hu! hu!” “Bless de Lord!”—for once articulate—moans, and shrieks.)

These are but fragments of the discourse, which lasted half an hour. What particularly interested me, both in the prayer and the sermon, was the action and reaction between speaker and audience. Never once did he take any notice of the wild sounds, as a political speaker would almost necessarily have done. I do not remember that he even paused for them; his rhetoric seemed to flow smoothly on. In other words, he did not openly “play to the gallery.” Yet there is no doubt that the hysterical cries and ululations were of value to him. He worked them up, and they worked him up. It must not be understood, however, that anything like the whole congregation joined in the noises. They seemed all to proceed from two or three definite points in the hall. One could almost have supposed them the prearranged paroxysms of an epileptic claque.

I stole out, under cover of a hymn, at the end of the sermon, not sorry to find myself once more in America. In the church (where I was the only white or even approximately white person present) I could not but feel that I was in Africa—slightly veneered.

For any disappointment I had felt in New Orleans, Charleston more than compensated me. Mr. Owen Wister, in “Lady Baltimore,” has in no way exaggerated its charm.

In situation it is not at all unlike New York, being built on a tongue of land between the broad estuaries of the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers. At the tip of the tongue (as in New York) is the Battery; but here the Battery is a beautiful, semi-tropical garden, full of live-oaks, palmettos, and flowering shrubs, with an esplanade overlooking the blue expanse of the harbour, the historic Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, and the low shores beyond. This garden is a fascinating spot. I returned to it again and again during my stay in the city. Passing up Meeting Street (the Broadway of Charleston), one finds, instead of the skyscrapers which shoulder one another in the lower end of New York, the simple, dignified old houses of a vanishing generation of Southern aristocrats, each standing end-on to the street, in its little plot of lawn and flowering shrubs. The typical Charlestonian house is a plain two or three storey structure, entirely surrounded at each level with broad verandahs and balconies. In several cases the floor area of verandah and balcony outside the walls must at least equal the floor area of the rooms inside the walls. Now, spacious verandahs always suggest to the mind the lazy luxury of a genial summer-land, deep lounging-chairs, cool drinks, and the glow of cigar-tips in the twilight. I am bound to say that I saw very little of this sort of life proceeding in the verandahs of Charleston; but that only enabled one all the more easily to people them with the ghosts of fifty years ago, before the guns of Fort Moultrie startled their calm. In Charleston I felt, almost for the first time, that the romance of the Old South had once been a reality. All of the South that I had hitherto seen had been remorselessly new.

Further up-town (as they would say in New York) the streets of Charleston become more commonplace, but always retain a character of their own. There is not a vestige of a sky-scraper in the whole peninsula. On the other hand, the city is dotted with old churches of the Wren style, each with its quiet burial-ground around it. Close to St. Michael’s Church and in front of the City Hall, is a sadly mutilated statue of the elder Pitt. It was erected in 1770, and its mutilation was begun by a British cannon-ball in 1780.

Let me add that Charleston, like New Orleans, is proud of its cemeteries, and with much better reason. Magnolia Cemetery, with its live-oaks and its little lake, is a really lovely garden. One historic live-oak of enormous size, draped in Spanish moss and with exquisite little ferns growing along each of its huge boughs, is not only a wonderful but an extraordinarily beautiful tree.

As to the population of Charleston my informants differed. |“No Trouble.”| A white man placed it at 60,000 in all, with 40,000 negroes; a negro at 65,000, with 33,000 negroes. As there has been no census since 1900, probably no one knows exactly; but it seems to be admitted that the blacks more or less considerably outnumber the whites. The white people, by their own account, pay nine-tenths of the taxes; the negroes aver that their real estate is assessed at a million and a half dollars—assessment representing only about 60 per cent. of actual value. Both statements are very likely true.

White Charleston plumes itself on a peculiar and hereditary understanding of the negro, and knowledge of the way to deal with him; whence it happens that there has been “no trouble”—no outrages or lynchings—in or around the city. Moreover, I was assured that negroes were employed in the police force, and that not long ago there was a black lieutenant of police, with white men under him.

But mark how the aspect of things alters according to the point of view from which they are regarded! When I mentioned to a little group of leading negroes this proof of the equal treatment accorded to the two races, I observed on their countenances an expressive smile. On inquiring its reason, I learned that there were indeed three coloured policemen out of a total force of 106; that they and a few others had been appointed at some long-past period of political compromise; and that, when they die off, there is not the smallest chance of their being replaced by men of colour. “Here, as elsewhere, the Irish control the police force; and the Irish hate us worse than the native Americans.”

It was an odd group, this coloured conclave in which I found myself. |The Negro and his Vote.| Only one member (a doctor) was dark-brown in complexion; two were very light-brown; while two others, again, were indistinguishable from white men. One reminded me strongly of a choleric old Scotch General whom I once knew; the other was very English in type, with smooth, silvery hair (prematurely white), and a large, round, placid, bovine face. Meeting him in England, you would have said he was a trifle sunburnt.

Their talk was mainly of their political grievances, and the various methods by which their race, all over the Southern States, were jockeyed out of their votes. Much of what they said I failed to follow; with a good deal of it, on the other hand, I was already pretty familiar.

The different States of the South have adopted methods differing in many details for excluding incompetent and undesirable voters from the polls; but the general principle has always been much the same. It has been to impose some slight test of education and intelligence (generally to read and explain some paragraph of the Constitution) on all who desire to have their names placed on the register.^[45]

If these tests were applied equally to the two races, the negro would have no ground of complaint. But exceptions are made in favour of the whites in the very laws establishing the tests. Most of them contain clauses analogous to what is known in Alabama as the “grandfather clause,” which provides that illiteracy shall not bar any one whose father or grandfather was entitled to vote at the outbreak of the Civil War. This exception is defended on the ground that even an illiterate person of the original Anglo-Saxon stock (the South is nothing if not Anglo-Saxon) is generally a very shrewd fellow, and eminently capable of exercising the franchise. Under the “grandfather clause,” then, only illiterate aliens and illiterate negroes are excluded from the register; and this discrimination is naturally resented by the negro.

But if the matter stopped there, the black race would not feel themselves so very much aggrieved. The real burden of their complaint is not the inequality of the laws, but the inequality of their administration. The tests of intelligence are applied (they declare) by unscrupulous registrars, who will ask a white man some simple question, such as whether imprisonment for debt is permitted, while they will pose a negro with some impossible technicality concerning a bill of attainder or an estate in tail. The upshot is that admission to the register depends entirely on the arbitrary will and pleasure of the registrars. Their decisions can be appealed against, but the appeal is said to be practically useless.

Nor is this all. When a negro happens to be a man of such property, education, and position that it is absolutely impossible to reject his vote, there is always the last resource of omitting to count it. One of the Charleston group spoke of a particular election in which he himself, and others of his people to his certain knowledge, cast Republican ballots; but the result, as announced, showed not a single Republican vote.

On this matter, as on so many others, it is very hard to get at the truth. White men aver, and will prove by statistics, that in proportion to his taxation the negro has very fair voting power, and is freely permitted to exercise it. But I met no single negro who would admit this; and most of them, like my Charleston friends, were very bitter on the question, as well as on the exclusion of even the most respectable of their race from the councils, the “machine,” of their party.

A remark made by one of this very intelligent Charleston group struck me as a curious comment on the belief of white Charleston that it has a special genius for dealing with the black race. “We negroes,” said this member of the race, “have no respect for the Southern white man’s opinions or his prophecies. He has always prophesied wrong. This thing is going to work out in the usual mysterious way, that the South will be very much surprised over.”

I quote word for word. “The usual mysterious way” may seem an odd phrase, but its meaning is not very far to seek.

In Charleston, under the guidance of a genial Southern gentleman placed in high educational authority, I saw a good deal both of white and of coloured schools. My guide was an enthusiast for negro education. “What’s the good,” he said, “of talking about being a superior race if you’re afraid to educate the negro? |White Negroes.| There’s not much superiority in that.” He admitted with regret that accommodation for negro children was very deficient, and said that those who were fighting for better accommodation had been crippled by the recent appointment of a negro to a Federal office in the town.

In a school containing twelve hundred black children, the fire alarm was given, and in exactly three minutes every child was in the playground, the whole school being ranged in “column of companies,” or, rather, of classes. Assuredly, such discipline cannot but be salutary. It was in this school too, that I heard five hundred negro children (most of them quite small, for three-fourths of them drop out after passing through the primary classes) singing in their clear, shrill voices—

Poor quaint little mortals! They were unconscious of any irony in the sentiment.

In every negro school or college that I visited—at Tuskegee among the rest—I saw several young people in whom my eye could not discern the slightest trace of black blood.^[46] But it was in Charleston, at an endowed school for negroes, that the most remarkable instance of this kind came under my notice. I was present at the morning muster of the whole school; and while the hymn was being sung I could not take my eyes off two boys of thirteen or fourteen, evidently brothers, who stood side by side in one of the upper classes. They were not only white, but (one would have said) peculiarly and resplendently white. Their features were delicate and distinguished, their eyes blue or grey, their hair a light brown. They were slightly built, and, although their dress was quite plain, they had somehow an air of grace and breeding. They could have gone to Eton or Winchester and excited no remark.

Shall I confess that the contrast between these boys and the ebony and chocolate manikins among whom their lot was cast stirred in me the race instinct in all its unreasoning crudity? I wanted to swoop down upon them and rescue them from what I felt for the moment to be their horrible and unnatural surroundings. They seemed to me like children in a fairy-tale, carried off by some tribe of brownies or gnomes. And who shall say, indeed, that the impulse to rescue them was wholly quixotic? If they remain in America, there can be no doubt that the life that lies before them will be one of painful misunderstandings, heart burnings, and humiliations.

Before leaving Charleston, let me record a curious little street-car incident. |A Street-car Incident.| Coloured people, in this city, are not confined to a special part of the car; but, each seat being designed to accommodate two passengers, a coloured person and white person must not sit side by side on the same seat. One afternoon I was in a car which was full save for one place. The foremost seat on the left hand was occupied by one negro girl, and there was, of course, a vacant place at her side. Presently a white woman got in and sat down in this place. “Hallo!” I thought, “here is a violation of the rule,”—and I wondered what would happen. The conductor was equal to the occasion. The foremost right-hand seat was occupied by a cadet of the Charleston Military Academy in his neat grey uniform, and by a lady. The conductor touched the cadet on the shoulder and whispered to him. The young man at once stood up, the white woman who had last entered the car transferred herself to his place, and for the rest of the journey the cadet hung on to the strap, while the seat beside the negro girl remained vacant!

At Charleston I was in some sense at a parting of the ways. In order to attend the Educational Conference at Memphis I had been compelled to leave out Virginia and North Carolina from the itinerary I had originally planned. Should I now return to New York, repairing this omission—taking Raleigh, Richmond, the Hampton Institute, and other interesting places, on my way? Or should I set my face once more southward, and return to England by way of the West Indies?

Several considerations determined me in favour of the latter course. Chief among them, perhaps, was the desire to visit the southernmost portion of the United States—a portion unknown to the past, but destined to figure largely in the history of the future—the Canal Zone of Panama.

Still, then, my motto was “Southward Ho!”

A slight misadventure frustrated my design of paying a short visit to Savannah. |St. Augustine.| At Jacksonville, the capital of Florida, I stayed just long enough to find it intolerably hot and excessively uninteresting; though here, as almost everywhere else on the east coast of Florida, a magnificent sheet of water (the St. John’s River) compensates for the monotony of the surrounding country.

I hurried on to St. Augustine, with its huge and really picturesque hotels (the Alcazar and the Ponce de Leon), its narrow, semi-Spanish streets, its fine old fort of the Vauban period, its beautiful lagoon, and (on Anastasia Island) its glorious stretch of silver-white ocean beach. But there was no temptation to linger anywhere in Florida, for the hotels were all shut up and the season was entirely over. I can imagine that, in the season, the Plaza de la Constitucion at St. Augustine is a busy and amusing spot. But no one could explain to me why the great hotels, instead of being placed in view of the bay or (still better) of the open sea, were huddled together, on no “situation” at all, in the centre of the little town. There is no doubt some reason for this; but it passed my divining.

Onward, then, by the Florida East Coast Railway, which is, if I am rightly informed, practically the undivided property of Mr. Flagler, a Standard Oil magnate. |The American Riviera.| (I heard the Governor of the State, Mr. Broward, deliver an attack on its monopolist pretensions in the Plaza at St. Augustine.) With a few hours’ pause at Daytona, I went right on to Miami, which was, till lately, the terminus of the railway—366 miles from Jacksonville.

Undoubtedly this margin of the great peninsula—this Riviera of the United States—has a charm of its own. Physically, however, nothing could be less like the Riviera. Here there are no Alps, no Esterels. There is not even a molehill that can be magnified into a mountain. It is a region of broad skies and broad waters, green scrub, and leagues on leagues of smooth, white beach, with the blue ocean curling idly over it. Apart from gardens and a very few neglected orange groves, I saw absolutely not one patch of cultivation between St. Augustine and Miami. The railroad would pass through miles of tangled scrub and acres of dwarf palmetto; the most dreary and monotonous country imaginable. Then suddenly a blue lagoon would open out, with delightful, low, board-veranda’d houses skirting it, and rich tropical gardens running down to the water’s edge. Then into the wilderness again, with only here and there a clearance and a cabin, and here and there, I grieve to say, acres of beautiful pine-trees bleeding to death for the enrichment of some turpentine company.

Miami—known to the natives as My-ammy—has the air of a busy and prosperous frontier town. It has the usual huge hotel, unusually well situated, at the junction between a beautiful river and a beautiful lagoon. Here we are quite clearly on the very verge of the tropics—coco-nut palms abound on every hand; coco-nut husks cumber the white shell roads; the gardens are full of hybiscus and other splendid flowering shrubs; and everywhere the gorgeous poinsiana regia flames in unabashed vermilion against the deep blue of the sky.

A wonderful piece of engineering is the railway over the Florida Keys—the low margin of islands, like those of the upper Adriatic, in which the peninsula tails off. By this time it may be completed all the way from Miami to Key West; but when I was there it had a half-way terminus at Knight’s Key.

For an hour after leaving Miami the railway runs through an almost unbroken pine forest. Here and there a rude cabin is visible, occupied, no doubt by platelayers; but there is not a single clearing or attempt at cultivation. Then, all of a sudden, the forest ceases, and we emerge upon open swamp prairies, dotted with clumps of low green scrub. To the north we can see the edge of the pine forest running off, like a black wall, into the dim distance. For another hour or thereabouts we trail through the coarse grass of the swamp prairies or salt marshes, broken only by occasional channels of water. Of habitation or cultivation there is no sign. Then we run out upon vast lagoons dotted with occasional scrub-covered islands. The railroad is built on a piled-up causeway of a sort of white shell-limestone—or is it, perhaps, coral?

On the whole, the outlook is rather monotonous; but there are patches of beauty. I remember vividly a huge green lagoon, with a low green shore beyond; in the foreground some sort of heron lazily flapping its way over the surface; and in the distance the white sails of a fore-and-aft schooner shining in the sun.

Then we pass through many miles of amazing and fantastic jungle. No tree, perhaps, is over thirty feet high; but all are strangelystrangely contorted and interwoven with vines and creepers—like the forest round the Sleeping Beauty’s castle. A few clearings are burnt away in this jungle, and things like banana trees are growing in them. But for an hour and a half after leaving Homestead (the station at the edge of the pine forest) I saw not a single human habitation.

Soon, however, we begin to catch occasional glimpses of the open sea—iridescent and exquisite—through gaps in the outer barrier of reefs. And now there are one or two houses to be seen. We stop at what seems to be a station. Some one in the car calls to a negro navvy on the line: “Say, what’s the name of this town?” Negro: “Illago, sa’.” Passenger: “How many people live here?” Negro: “None at all, sa’.”

Now we are practically out at sea, crossing miles of blue water between the islands, sometimes on limestone (or coral?) causeways, sometimes on long bridges of wooden trestles. At one point there lies, about half a mile from the line, a little island, perhaps a mile long, entirely covered with palm-trees, and with a single wooden house upon it—suggesting an atoll of the Southern Seas.

At a place called Long Key we stopped for lunch. Long Key is a settlement of some twenty one-storey wooden houses, all raised on piles about four feet from the ground, and with every doorway and window screened with wire gauze. The whole place is embowered in palms; and under the palms, twenty yards from the green sea, a wooden counter had been set up, with the word “lunch,” rudely painted on a shingle, displayed above it. Two white women served behind the counter and dispensed coffee (the milk poured through a gimlet hole in a tin), sandwiches, coco-nut milk, and little packages of coco-nut candy. I had never before tasted coco-nut milk and am not eager to quaff it again. It suggests nothing so much as weak eau sucrée. The frugal meal, in its romantic surroundings, was pleasant enough; but I could wish that the wire-gauze screens had been run round the lunch-counter. It was a “quick lunch”—only fifteen minutes allowed—yet when I returned to the train I found my neck quite rough with mosquito-bites.

From Long Key we presently ran out on an immense viaduct, some two miles long, I should say, of concrete arches. |Asia and Africa.| Then again across jungle-covered islands and some smaller lagoons. Here signs of life grew more frequent, for we were approaching the point where the extension of the line is actively proceeding. The labourers seem to be for the most part accommodated in huge house-boats, which we saw here and there moored in convenient creeks and channels. The majority, I think, are negroes, with a considerable intermixture of “Dagos” and some East Indian coolies.

At one point we passed a large truck crowded with half-naked negro navvies, who swarmed over it and clung on to it in every possible attitude, grinning, joking, indulging in horse-play, so far as their close quarters would allow—the very picture, in short, of good-humoured, muscular animalism. And in the middle of the swarm, penned in on every side, and yet utterly aloof, stood two turbaned Easterns; austere, unbending, sombre, a trifle sinister. The negroes’ vivacity and humour made them, in a way, more sympathetic, but, at the same time, threw into relief the distinction of the Orientals. They looked like kings in exile among a rabble of savages. “Mere Aryan prejudice,” you will say. Yes; but that means that it is prehistoric and inveterate.

Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard, and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.