were
deep in mud, all the worse because it was beginning to dry on the
surface, forming a tough crust above the hasty-pudding which, if
broken through, held the horse's leg suspended as in a vice, and
would have thrown him down, if it were possible to throw down a
West-Indian horse. We passed in one place a quaint little relic of
the older world; a small sugar-press, rather than mill, under a roof
of palm-leaf, which was worked by hand, or a donkey, just as a
Spanish settler would have worked it three hundred years ago. Then
on through plenty of garden cultivation, with all the people at
their doors as we passed, fat and grinning: then up to a good high-
road, and a school for Coolies, kept by a Presbyterian clergyman,
Mr. Morton--I must be allowed to mention his name--who, like a
sensible man, wore a white coat instead of the absurd regulation
black one, too much affected by all well-to-do folk, lay as well as
clerical, in the West Indies. The school seemed good enough in all
ways. A senior class of young men--including one who had had his
head nearly cut off last year by misapplication of that formidable
weapon the cutlass, which every coloured man and woman carries in
the West Indies--could read pretty well; and the smaller children--
with as much clothing on as they could be persuaded to wear--were a
sight pleasant to see. Among them, by the by, was a little lady who
excited my astonishment. She was, I was told, twelve years old.
She sat summing away on her slate, bedizened out in gauze petticoat,
velvet jacket--between which and the petticoat, of course, the waist
showed just as nature had made it--gauze veil, bangles, necklace,
nose-jewel; for she was a married woman, and her Papa (Anglice,
husband) wished her to look her best on so important an occasion.

This over-early marriage among the Coolies is a very serious evil,
but one which they have brought with them from their own land. The
girls are practically sold by their fathers while yet children,
often to wealthy men much older than they. Love is out of the
question. But what if the poor child, as she grows up, sees some
one, among that overplus of men, to whom she, for the first time in
her life, takes a fancy? Then comes a scandal; and one which is
often ended swiftly enough by the cutlass. Wife-murder is but too
common among these Hindoos, and they cannot be made to see that it
is wrong. 'I kill my own wife.