olor Question" for the _New York Planet_, he found
that he had struck a subject on which anyone and everyone he met was
willing to talk--as the Managing Editor no doubt had anticipated when he
suggested the series to the boy.

In one respect--as almost everyone he interviewed pointed out--Barbados
differs from every other of the West India Islands. It is densely
populated, so densely, indeed, that there is not a piece of land
suitable for cultivation which is not employed. The great ambition of
the Barbadian is to own land. The spirit of loyalty to the island is
incredibly strong.

This dense population and intensive cultivation has made the struggle
for existence keen in Barbados. A job is a prize. This has made the
Barbadian negro a race apart, hardworking and frugal. Until the building
of the Panama Canal, few negroes left their island home. With the help
of his newspaper friends, Stuart was able to send to his paper a fairly
well-written article on the Barbadian negro. The boy was wise enough to
take advice from his new friends how best to write the screed.

Moreover, he learned that there was also, on the island, a very unusual
and most interesting colony of "poor whites," the descendants of English
convicts who had been brought to the island in the seventeenth century.
These were not criminals, but political prisoners who had fought in
Monmouth's Rebellion. Pitied by the planters, despised even by the negro
slaves, this small colony held itself aloof, starved, and married none
but members of their own colony. They are now mere shadows of men, with
puny bodies and witless minds, living in brush or wooden hovels and
eating nothing but a little wild fruit and fish.

Their story made another good article for Stuart's paper, and he spent
almost an entire day holding such conversation with them as he could,
though their English language had so far degenerated that the boy found
it hard to understand.

The colony is not far from the little village of Bathsheba, which Stuart
had reached by the tramway that crosses the island. The returning tram
was not due to start for a couple of hours, and so, idly, Stuart
strolled southward along the beach, which, at that point, is fringed
with curiously shaped rocks, forming curving bays shaded with thickets
of trees which curve down to the shore. Some of these were
modest-looking trees, something like apple-trees but with a longer,
thinner leaf. They bore a fruit like a green ap