visited, and the most of its people are negroes. The streets are filled with blacks and mulattoes, nearly all dressed in white. The men wear white shirts and trousers and white straw hats, and the women white or colored dresses and bright-colored turbans. How straight the women are! There come two with bundles on their heads. It is this way of carrying things that gives them their erect figures.

Farther on is a black policeman with a white helmet. There are black soldiers and black merchants, lawyers, and doctors. This is the case with most of the Lesser Antilles and also of Jamaica and Haiti. The blacks were brought as slaves from Africa to work the sugar plantations. They were afterward freed, and they now form an important part of the island population, and on many of the West .Indies the most important part. The sugar estates of

Barbados are largely owned by colored people, although the island belongs to England and is ruled by a governor sent out from that country.

Leaving Barbados, we sail for Trinidad, stopping at Kingstown, the capital of St. Vincent, and at St. George in Grenada, another English island below. Both Grenada and St. Vincent are volcanic. They have a rich soil and raise all sorts of tropical fruits, including spices and the cacao from which chocolate is made.

Trinidad is the largest of the Lesser Antilles. It is a rectangular island lying so close to the South American continent that we could cross over in a very few hours. It is thickly populated, having about two hundred and fifty. thousand inhabitants.

The island is devoted to sugar, and among its people

are eighty-five thousand Hindus who have come here to work on the sugar estates. We see Hindus and Chinese among the blacks and whites at the wharf of Port of Spain, where we land; the vegetation is like that of Ceylon, and we wonder if we are not off the coast of southern India, instead of off South America.

Port of Spain is the capital of Trinidad. It is a wellkept little city with all modern improvements. It has places where we can hire bicycles, and we ride about over the country, visiting the sugar, coffee, and cacao plantations. Now we stop to gather flowers and ferns by the roadside, now to watch the butterflies, which are so beautiful in this part of the world, and again to laugh at the monkeys, which angrily scold at us out of the trees.

Our most interesting trip from Port of Spain is to La Brea, a little peninsula on Trinidad about thirty-six miles away. Upon this peninsula is an asphalt lake, whose

contents have furnished the pavements of many an American city.

We have all heard of asphalt, and many of us have walked or ridden upon it. It is a sort of pitchlike substance, mixed with sand, which melts when heated, but when cold is as hard as stone. This stuff can be spread over a road, making it perfectly smooth. It can be put upon paper or other material and made into roofing, or it can be used for walks and floors.

Near La Brea, in the top of a hill about 130 feet above the sea, there is a lake of such pitch. It is a mile and a half in circumference, and in it there are several million tons of asphalt.

We go to La Brea by sea, smelling the pitch as we near the peninsula. The beach is coated with hard pitch, and

there are grayish black pitch pebbles upon it. We make our way up the black road to the top of the hill, and at last stand on the border of the lake. It looks somewhat like a great sheet of asphalt pavement, dotted with little islands of grass or stunted trees. It has cracks filled with water, and in some places gas is coming out.

We see men on the lake digging pitch, and start across it. At the center our boots sink in almost to our ankles, and we hurry on, fearing we may get fast in the pitch and not be able to pull ourselves out. Nevertheless our feet are comparatively clean. There is so much water and oil in the asphalt that it does not stick. We take up some and wring the water out of it with our hands, and are told we might knead it an hour before it would become sticky.

Vast quantities of this asphalt are shipped away every year, but the stuff gradually rises and fills the places dug out, so that one really does not know how much there is. Near the lake there are places for purifying the asphalt. It is boiled in huge caldrons and then run off into barrels, in which shape it goes to the markets.

Returning to Port of Spain, we are at a loss to know where to go next. We might visit Tobago (tō-bā'gō), a mountainous little island belonging to Great Britain, peopled by negroes, or sail along the northern coast of South America to visit Curaçao (koo-ra-sō'), belonging to the Dutch, and other little islands of that region. We wish, however, to continue our explorations of the Lesser Antilles, and hence make our way northward to St. Lucia, belonging to Great Britain. We go by the Pitons, two mighty rocks of the shape of gigantic cones two thousand