bed. As became a decent wife, she howled and wailed properly.

So Ma Presence was again a lonely widow. She used to poke with her stick, and find her way to our house several times a week. She was a cheery, humorous old soul, and could tell stories of scenes in her life and all sorts of gossip with such vivacity and spirit that I never tired of listening to her. No people in the world can tell stories like the negroes, and she was among the best of the kind, and withal her simplicity was almost childish. In course of time some Moravian missionaries settled in Blewfields, and all the people forthwith took up religion and praying.

It was not long before this fervour attacked Ma Presence. The chief missionary's name was the Rev. Mr. Pfeiffer, and for a while she became his devoted disciple. One day she groped her way to our house, and said to my sister: Miss Bell, please gie me pair a old silpas. Maas Pfeiffer say me mus turn pryin soul; but how me foo turn pryin soul when me no hab no silpas?' So having been provided with a pair of old slippers, she duly attended at church, and became a praying soul.

Christmas at Blewfields was something worth seeing. Everyone who possibly could came home for the festivity, and a week or so before it all the men went hunting to provide meat for the occasion. For although a few pigs, fowls, and goats were kept, nine-tenths of the meat of the people was procured from the sea or the bush. Thus, at Christmas every properly-provided house had much store of barbecued monkeys, warree (a large species of peccary), deer, tapir, curassow; also salted fish, live hiccatee (river tortoise), and iguanas; also plantains, green or made into foofoo-that is, cut up, put into large baskets, and buried in the earth till partially rotten, then dried in the sun, and made into flour. Yams and rice are also laid into store, and much sugar-cane, and if anyone has a pig or goat to spare,

it feels the knife on this joyous occasion. The girls, among those who can afford to buy flour, make great piles of plantain tarts, which I used to think the most delicious sweetmeat in the world. It is made by taking ripe plantains, boiling them, and beating them into a thick paste, then flavouring with pimento, ginger, grated lemon-peel, and a little black pepper. Then make a light dough of flour, eggs, and a little fresh lard; make portions of the dough into little boats, fill the cavity with ripe plantain paste, pinch up the dough till the little boat is closed round it, and bake in a Dutch oven.

For a week previous to Christmas you will see women and boys laboriously squeezing sugar-cane in the odd-looking African mill. This is a stout post fixed in the ground, into which a flat slab, like a little table, is mortised and wedged up tight. Above the slab is a round hole in the post, into which a stout bar of wood fits loosely. Then a large calabash is placed on the ground below the little table, a lad inserts the long bar in the hole, and lifts the end high enough for a woman to slip the sugar-cane between the bar and the table. The boy then presses down the bar, the cane is crushed, and the woman slips it forward till it is all crushed; then she twists it like a rope, and wrings the last drop of juice into the calabash. A great pot is on the fire, into which every calabash as it fills is poured. An old woman, skilled in the art, presides over the pot with her implements, which are a cocoanut shell fixed to a long stick, and a large branch of sea-fan. With the latter she gathers the scum from the boiling juice, and with the former she ladles and tests its thickness, and bangs the woolly heads of urchins who are watching around to steal a calabashful. When the juice is boiled to a clear thick syrup it is stored in demijohns for use, to sweeten coffee and chocolate, and make lemonade.

Now all is ready for the feast, and Christmas Eve is announced by firing guns. A good deal of rum is being

CHRISTMAS AT BLEWFIELDS

29

drunk, and much fighting is going on among men and boys; but it is taken in good part, and bunged-up eyes, bleeding noses, and cut lips are soon forgotten in the general merriment. Soon as the evening shades prevail the drum takes up its wondrous tale, and together with the fiddle inspires the mad capers of the jig, the carabini, the punta, or the country dance; while the horse's jaw-bone, the teeth rattled with a stick, and two other sticks beating time on a bench, with the drum and the wild snatches of song by the women, provide the stimulus for the weird and mystic African dances, at which the younger men and the young women of the period look askance, as savouring too much of African slavery.

It will hardly be believed that dancing is carried on almost continuously till a week after New Year. On Christmas Day and Boxing Day, on New Year's Day and next day, the dancing is carried on day and night, the rest of the time at night only. The dancers and musicians go from house to house without asking leave, for no one dreams of refusing admission to the merrymakers, except in our house, where they never intrude. Those who are tired out lie down and sleep in the beds of the houses they happen to be in, or on the floor or on the benches. The musicians give their instruments up to others and sleep wherever they like, and still the mad frolic goes on. Crowds surround the house where dancing is going on, and follow the dancers to the next house, going inside and joining the dance when they like. Guns are fired continually. Many pairs of men are fighting with the fist, for they are expert boxers, and admiring crowds surround them and see fair play. The contagion of fighting extends to the boys, until the general mêlée becomes too serious, when the women rush in and restore harmony, which is easily done, for it seems a point of honour not to harbour anger at Christmas time.

The weather at Christmas is generally fine, and numbers

of women may be seen in all their finery sleeping on the grass in the shade of the trees. From time to time one or more wake up, wash their faces in a calabash of water, and hasten off to join the dancers. Of course the children don't dance, but they are sailing boats in the lagoon, or practising with straightened sticks for spears on cocoanut husks for a target; or they gather quantities of green limes or the fruit of a species of solanum called 'cock up bubby,' and forming themselves into opposing armies, each with a leader, pelt each other till one side gives way.

The little girls are generally burdened with a naked baby sitting astride on the hip, but they manage to amuse themselves, sometimes at the cost of the babies, which they have left sprawling and crying on the grass, till the mothers, being warned of the state of affairs, rush from the dance, pick up the babies, and pursue the delinquents into the bush.

There are other diversions for those who are tired of dancing; for sailing races on the lagoon, and cock-fighting, have each their votaries at Christmas-time.

Before the Moravian missionaries arrived we were very heathen at Blewfields. There was no marriage, no christening, no church, and even when the missionaries introduced marriage the people did not take to it much: they preferred their own looser tie.

The first thing the missionaries did was to abolish 'wakes,' as being too heathen. The old obeah men who conducted the wakes would not have white people at them; but on one occasion Ma Patience concealed me beneath her dress, so that I saw something of it. It is so long ago, and I was so frightened, that I have a very dim recollection of the ceremony. The dead body was in an adjoining room, and the room where the wake was held was lighted with pitch-pine torches stuck into the ground. An old African obeah man sat on the ground, and with hideous faces and ghastly rolling of his eyeballs muttered some dreadful words, while he mixed

something in a calabash and went round the room offering The obeah man all the time was

it to various persons.

chanting and grunting in unknown words. Some of the people drank from the calabash, some did not. Then those who had drunk got up and walked round the room, singing some strange refrain, while those seated, among whom were a few old women, clapped their hands and chanted a sort of

response.

I only remember one of these.

The obeah man called

out some strange words, when immediately those who were walking round sang the refrain:

'Ah quaqua hanancy doo,

Aha tonda rake am.'

The women and those sitting clapped their hands and followed up this song, but all in different tones, till the air seemed alive with the refrain in every imaginable key, but all answering each other in exact time.

No one knows what the first sentence means. 'Tonda rake am' is English, and means, May thunder rake (or strike) him.' Then the obeah man talked some more words, and this started the others in another weird song.

After this an old African told hanancy stories. Hanancy is some African name for a spider, which is usually the hero of these strange animal stories, for which the Africans are famous and unequalled. I regret that I do not remember any of these stories, which this old man would never repeat except at a wake. I asked him once to tell me one of his wake stories, but he turned a horrid eye on me, and said, 'Go way, Backra buay, you too papisho.'