114
THE
ENGLISH
IN
THE
WEST
INDIES
and forgot; but there was not a weed to be seen or broken fence where fence was needed. The soil was clean, every inch of it, as well hoed and trenched as in a Middlesex market garden. Salt fish and flour, which is the chief food of the blacks, is imported; but vegetables enough are raised in Barbadoes to keep the cost of living incredibly low; and, to my uninstructed eyes, it seemed that even if sugar and wages did fail there could be no danger of any sudden famine. The people were thick as rabbits in a warren; women with loaded baskets on their heads laugh足 ing and chirruping, men driving donkey carts, four donkeysabreast, smoking their early pipes as if they had not a care in the world, as, indeed, they have not. On we went, the Colonel's horses stepping out twelvemiles an hour, and I wondered privately what was to become of our breakfast. We were striking right across the island, along the coral ridge which forms the backbone of it. We found ourselves at length in a grove of orange trees and shaddocks, at the old church of St. John's, which stands upon a perpendicular cliff; Codrington College on the level under our feet, and beyond us the open Atlantic and the everlasting breakers from the trade winds fringing the shore with foam. Far out were the white sails of the fishing smacks. The Barbadians are careless of weather, and the best of boat sailors. It was very pretty in the bright morning, and the church itself was not the least interesting part of the scene. The door was wide open. We went in, and I seemed to be in a parish church in England as parish churches used to be when I was a child. There were the old-fashioned seats, the old unadorned communion table, the old pulpit and reading desk and the clerk's desk below, with the lion and the unicorn conspicu足 ous above the chancel arch. The white tablets on the wall bore familiar names dating back into the last century. On the floor were flagstones still older with armorial bearings and