II.

IN KINGSTON STREETS.

KINGSTON has all the characteristics of a town which has lost its self-respect. Like a man who has seen better days, it has given up attending even to its personal appearance. "It looks what it is," said Sewell, who visited it in 1860-"a place where money has been made, but can be made no more. It is used up, and cast aside as useless."1 Broken walls, charred beams, crumbling ruins meet one in all directions. Harbour Street, the main thoroughfare, is unpaved; and gutters to carry off the heavy rains which fall at certain seasons of the year are unknown. At such times the streets are rivers; business is suspended; many of the stores do not take down their shutters, and the miserable town looks more miserable than ever.

It would be difficult to imagine a place whose general aspect depresses one so much as Kingston. The town rises gradually from the sea to the height of about 100 feet. It reaches its highest elevation at the racecourse, and its lowest at the Company's wharf. Between the two, and right in the middle

1 Ordeal of Free Labour in the British West Indies, p. 175. New York. 1861.

of the city, is the Parade; an open square presently being laid out by Government as a garden, with a waterless fountain in the midst, and a statue of Lord Metcalfe. Facing each other, top and bottom, are the Theatre and the Parish Church. The other two sides of the square are occupied by the old barracks (soon to be converted into a handsome court-house), and a church built of red brick, belonging, we believe, to the Wesleyan denomination.

Owing to the unmodulated flatness of its site, Kingston, from the water, presents the appearance of a mere confused mass of sun-baked buildings. Close to the sea, truly, stands a large circular iron building recently erected by the Government as a metropolitan market; but here, as was right and proper in a case where public money was to be expended, convenience has been studied in preference to beauty; and the structure, though handsome enough of its kind, can hardly be said to add much to the amenity of the landscape. The only other architectural feature which breaks the dull monotony of the sky-line is what looks like a little white pigeon-cot hidden away at the back of the town. This is the spire of the Parish Church, and the only attempt at a spire in Kingston; and doubtless the good people of the town would be very proud of it, were it not that the Spanishtonians, between whom and the Kingstonians there exists a feeling of jealousy, not to say a feud, possess one attached to their cathedral exactly of the same shape and size, and situated in very nearly the same position in their midst.

There is a marvellous lack of appreciation of the beautiful in the Creole mind.1 Tropical towns are generally little more than a group of barns and sheds. The public buildings are pre-eminently the former : the private buildings are too often little better than the latter. This is the more remarkable, because the sites of these towns, especially when they date back, as many of them do, to the old Spanish days, have been selected with a wonderful eye to their natural surroundings—at the head of land-locked bays, perched on rocky crags, or commanding some wide and spreading view of strath or sea, of bold and escarped mountain, or green and cane-covered plain.

In Kingston, the streets, although laid out on the most formal and geometrical principles, are clumsy and irregular. The houses, with their steep, shingled roofs, are of all sorts and sizes. They cannot even boast "a picturesque confusion." Most of them are fronted with covered verandahs called "piazzas," provided with jalousies to fend off the vertical sun, which gives them the cheerful look of houses shut up for the season, whilst the family are out of town. The principal entrance is as often on the second storey as on the first, and at the side of the house rather than in the front. The ordinary arrangement of a Jamaica house is something like this: Entering

1 The word Creole, in its literal acceptation, simply means a person born in the West Indies, independent of all complexional distinctions. In England "it is most commonly used to express a mulatto;" but it is a mistake to suppose, as The Saturday Review in an article on Creole Grammar (March 26, 1870) lays it down, that "its strict meaning is a native of a colony, of European race, as opposed to an immigrant."

upon the piazza, which is fitted up with rocking chairs and ottomans, you pass to the drawing-room, off which the bedrooms diverge on every side. The dining-room is generally upon the ground floor, and to reach this you have either to descend by a trap stair or by the same outside staircase by which you gained admission to the drawing-room. The bedrooms, especially in country houses, are small and ill ventilated. In "old time" houses the only room of anything like decent dimensions is the dining-room

-a striking instance of the social habits of the colony in its so-called palmy days.

There are no public buildings worthy of the name in Kingston as yet. The churches, except in one or two instances, are without the slightest claims to architectural beauty. The Parish Church is remarkable only from its old mahogany altar-screen, and the antiquity of some of its monuments. Close before the altar-rails lie the remains of the gallant Admiral Benbow; and the old song still commemorates

"How the people thronged very much

To see brave Admiral Benbow laid in Kingston town church." The Church of England has never been the church of the colony; consequently the number of Dissenting chapels, both in Kingston and throughout the island, far exceeds those belonging to the (Dis-) Establishment. The Baptists, Jews, Wesleyans, Methodists, the Established and Free Churches of Scotland, Moravians, Roman Catholics, and Independents, all have numerous places of worship of their own.

The

Of the public establishments of the colony, the best conducted are the General Penitentiary, the Lunatic Asylum, and the Public Hospital. ruling principle of the two former is the utilisation of the labour of the inmates. In the former brick and tile making, coir and oakum picking, boat building, printing, and lime burning are successfully carried on. In the country districts the convicts in the local prisons are employed in road making, pasture cleaning, and other agricultural works. In Kingston the streets are cleaned and kept in repair by their labour. In the General Penitentiary the treadmill is used to grind corn. The female prisoners, who are brought into the prison under masks as hideous as those of a San Benito, do all the washing of the establishment, and also the ships' washing for the steamers of the Royal Mail Company. Up to a very recent period, the hair of all women undergoing punishment with hard labour, in the Penitentiary, was cut off on their entering the establishment, and, as at home, no part of their punishment was felt more. We have been told by an official connected with the prison establishment in the colony, that it was a common practice for a woman who felt herself pretty sure of being convicted, to cut off her wool before her trial, and give it to a friend to keep for her until her term of "labour at the Penn," as the negroes jocularly call it, was over. On coming out, it could easily be tacked on again to her head by the help of a needle and thread. Her thick bandana handkerchief would,