ng thereby the size of their lips,
and breaking out, often enough, their upper front teeth. We had
seen, and eaten too, the sweet sop {25a}--a passable fruit, or
rather congeries of fruits, looking like a green and purple
strawberry, of the bigness of an orange. It is the cousin of the
prickly sour-sop; {25b} of the really delicious, but to me unknown,
Chirimoya; {25c} and of the custard apple, {25d} containing a pulp
which (as those who remember the delectable pages of Tom Cringle
know) bears a startling likeness to brains. Bunches of grapes, at
St. Kitts, lay among these: and at St. Lucia we saw with them, for
the first time, Avocado, or Alligator pears, alias midshipman's
butter; {26a} large round brown fruits, to be eaten with pepper and
salt by those who list. With these, in open baskets, lay bright
scarlet capsicums, green coconuts tinged with orange, great roots of
yam {26b} and cush-cush, {26c} with strange pulse of various kinds
and hues. The contents of these vegetable baskets were often as
gay-coloured as the gaudy gowns, and still gaudier turbans, of the
women who offered them for sale.

Screaming and jabbering, the Negroes and Negresses thrust each
other's boats about, scramble from one to the other with gestures of
wrath and defiance, and seemed at every moment about to fall to
fisticuffs and to upset themselves among the sharks. But they did
neither. Their excitement evaporated in noise. To their 'ladies,'
to do them justice, the men were always civil, while the said
'ladies' bullied them and ordered them about without mercy. The
negro women are, without doubt, on a more thorough footing of
equality with the men than the women of any white race. The causes,
I believe, are two. In the first place there is less difference
between the sexes in mere physical strength and courage; and
watching the average Negresses, one can well believe the stories of
those terrible Amazonian guards of the King of Dahomey, whose boast
is, that they are no longer women, but men. There is no doubt that,
in case of a rebellion, the black women of the West Indies would be
as formidable, cutlass in hand, as the men. The other cause is the
exceeding ease with which, not merely food, but gay clothes and
ornaments, can be procured by light labour. The negro woman has no
need to marry and make herself the slave of a man, in order to get a
home and subsistence. Independent she is, for