twenty or thirty yards from the house,
which, at this place, had a bank free of marsh for a distance of perhaps
a couple of hundred yards.

"It was just at a place like this, but a little higher up-stream," said
the planter, "that the snake story happened which Kingsley described in
'At Last.' Four girls were bathing in this river, because the surf is
too heavy for sea-bathing, and one of them, who had gone into the water
partly dressed, felt something clutch at her dress.

"It was a huge anaconda.

"The other three girls, with a good deal of pluck, I think, rushed into
the shallow water and grabbed hold of their comrade. The snake did not
let go, but the dress was torn from her body by the wrestle between the
strength of the reptile and that of the four girls. I know one of the
sisters quite well. She's an old woman, now, but she lives in Sangre
Grande, still."

Turning from the river, Stuart and the planter strolled some distance
down the knife-like sandy ridge between the ocean and the swamp. This
narrow ridge, at no point a hundred yards wide and averaging less than
half that, contains over 300,000 palms, and this plantation alone helps
to make Trinidad one of the greatest coco-nut markets of the world.

"I notice," said Stuart, anxious to get material for his articles, "that
nearly all your laborers here are East Indian coolies. Are they better
than negroes?"

"They come here under different conditions," explained the planter. "The
negro is free to work or not, as he chooses, but the coolie is
indentured. He has to work. He earns less than the negro, but, by the
time we pay his voyage and all the various obligations that we have to
undertake for an indentured laborer, the coolie isn't much cheaper to us
than the negro. But, while the negro can do more work in a day than the
coolie, he won't. Moreover, if he feels, after a few days' work, that he
has had enough of it, he just goes away. A Trinidad negro with a pound
or two in his pocket won't do a tap of work until the last penny be
spent. The coolie will work quietly, steadily, continuously. What is
more, he saves his money. That's bringing about a deuced curious
situation in Trinidad, you know.

"One of the queer things about the West Indies, as you know yourself,
having lived in Cuba, is that there is really no middle class. Here, in
Trinidad, there are the wealthy Spanish families and the English
officials and planters. The blacks are the laborers. For