A LOST FEBRUARY 



up the Rio Minho, often fording the shallow and 

 pellucid stream, falling in with colored men with 

 whom we walked and talked, crossing hiUs and 

 mountains on an easy grade, on to the home of 

 Colonel Hix, near Kendal. We had a letter to 

 Colonel Hix, and were received by him and his wife 

 with true Jamaican hospitality. The colonel is 

 superintendent of schools for a large section of the 

 island. He had served in our Civil War, and had 

 come to Jamaica from RUnois more than thirty 

 years before, in a very bad way from pulmonary 

 trouble. The climate had healed him, and he was 

 now as well as a man over seventy can reasonably 

 hope to be. He expected to finish his days in 

 Jamaica. His house was aptly named " Cozy," and 

 the hours we spent there are very pleasant to recall. 

 Colored people everywhere in their starched Sunday 

 clothes swarmed in the roads and lanes, going to 

 and from their huts amid the trees and bushes, 

 chatting, laughing, and supplying the human ele- 

 ment that this rather rude and broken landscape 

 needed. 



The next day we continued our journey westward 

 toward the Cock Pit country and the valley of the 

 Black River, passing through a section where the 

 chief product was ginger. The boys and girls all 

 seemed occupied in peeling ginger roots, and before 

 every hut were little platforms where the roots were 

 drying. We passed a family moving, and appar- 

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