THE ISLAND OF EASE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 88, 8 January 1926, Page 13

THE ISLAND OF EASE

There is a spot within the British Empire where you can buy a good plump fowl for eighteen pence. You may have a choice grape-fruit for your breakfast for the sum of one-halfpenny, ror a shilling you can buy a bucketful ot oranges. From the glorious sun which shines all day you may shelter beneath a palm as shady as any used by the poets, and the cost will be no more than the gentle energy of a few steps. Moreover, • the place is historical, for inscribed upon a stone column you may read, if you are not. too lazy, that you stond where Columbus made his first landing when he discovered, as he thought, (writes "Shellback” in the \\ eeklj Telegraph.”). The island, which is about ten miles long and three miles broad, is that Ot San Salvador, one of the lesser known of the Bahama group. There are no towns, unless Cockburn Town a collection of small houses grouped near a sandy beach, can be so called. There i. practically no trade. Life seems too easv without it. AVith the exception of a few officials and two white families, the iritives are negroes, and are the descendants of freed slaves. They must have been bappv slaves, for the natural politeness of their descendants does not savour o F expectancy, and is obviously the product" of several generations. One gets the impression that here is the Earlv Victorian era. The pictures iu the houses suggest it. the conversation ■ind mental attitude of the people affirm it. Possibly lack of settlement since those days accounts for this. There are two farms, neither b-ing worked with feverish activity, which were acquired, it is said, in lieu of their pensions by two retired naval officers, the ancestors of the present landowners, and who were the owners of the slave forbears ol the present coloured population. There is no incentive to work where such dance of lish is to be bad tor the lishing in blue waters around the island: so clear that you can watch your next, meal bile Ul liie bait. AVi'.d duck, and. if you prefer them, flamingoes, are to be shot upon the largo inland lake. Fruit grows easily on its banks, and the climate calls for scanty clothing.

Ladies and children travelling in smoking carriages have been much in evidence during the holidays (says the Auckland “Star”). Au instance happened on Thursday. \\ hen the .1 hames express pulied out it was observed tiiat the second-class smoker wa? three parts full of women and children. One mother had two twin babes occupying the seat next to her. When asked why she preferred to travel in a smoker,- a replv was given that it was much healthier to do so. A man who had been searching in vnin for a seat was iieard to remark, “A chap should organise a pipe-smoking gang, and get in there, close the windows, and smoke the women out.” Some ten minutes before the train left there were seats in non-smoking compartments, but- the “smokers” were the cars- ’p filled,