194 Natural History Bulletin. 



Wesle}', and hard by is the cemetery, a desolate enough look- 

 ing enclosure, where the irregularly disposed mounds of coral 

 sand, surmounted by white head-boards, are unrelieved by 

 any sign of grass or turf, although some shrubbery with bril- 

 liant scarlet blossoms gives a touch of beauty. Upon inspec- 

 tion, one sees that the graves are fairlv riddled with holes 

 made by land-crabs, and can hardly repress a shudder at the 

 repulsive thought of these ugl}'. crawling scavengers, whose 

 presence attests the fate of the bodies entrusted to this ceme- 

 tery. After all, however, this is no more repulsive than the 

 accompaniments of all civilized burial. Perhaps, indeed, less 

 so, in that the process is more rapid here than elsewhere. 



l^ut the thing which impresses the stranger as the most 

 peculiar about this interesting town is that it has no streets in 

 the part where the houses are most thicklv aggregated^, 

 although there is a wide and tolerably straight path leading 

 from the western part of the village toward the west end of 

 the island. A little reflection will show us, however, that 

 streets are entirely superfluous in a towai which is zvithont a 

 single zuhcclcd vehicle of cniy land. In its early history this 

 community, like others in the West Indies, was liable to hos- 

 tile incursions from piratical crews, and this mav account for 

 the manner in which the houses are huddled together, when 

 there would appear to be abundant room to spread out com- 

 fortably. It looks for all the world like a covey of quail 

 bunched together in fear of the dogs. 



It was the privilege of the writer to spend some months 

 in this unique community during a previous visit to the Baha- 

 mas, and thus to obtain something more than a superficial 

 knowledge of the life of these people. I speak advisedly in 

 using the word '•unique," for here is a community of some five 

 or six hundred souls, nearly ail of them white and descendants 

 of Englishmen, which seems to me to be more isolated from 

 the world than any other community of like character and 

 size that can be found. Here are adult men, speaking the 

 English language with a maltreatment of the h's equal to 

 that of the most approved London cockney, some of whom,. 



