favour of themselves and the cocks.  But are our amusements to be compared with those of the old Greeks, with the one exception of liking to hear really good music?  Yet that fruit of civilisation is barely twenty years old; and we owe its introduction, be it always remembered, to the Germans.  French civilisation signifies practically, certainly in the New World, little save ballet-girls, billiard-tables, and thin boots:  English civilisation, little save horse-racing and cricket.  The latter sport is certainly blameless; nay, in the West Indies, laudable and even heroic, when played, as on the Savanna here, under a noonday sun which feels hot enough to cook a mutton-chop.  But with all respect for cricket, one cannot help looking back at the old games of Greece, and questioning whether man has advanced much in the art of amusing himself rationally and wholesomely.

I had reason to ask the same question that evening, as we sat in the cool verandah, watching the fireflies flicker about the tree-tops, and listening to the weary din of the tom-toms which came from all sides of the Savanna save our own, drowning the screeching and snoring of the toads, and even, at times, the screams of an European band, which was playing a ‘combination tune,’ near the Grand Stand, half a mile off.

To the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, the coloured folk would dance perpetually till ten o’clock, after which time the rites of Mylitta are silenced by the policeman, for the sake of quiet folk in bed.  They are but too apt, however, to break out again with fresh din about one in the morning, under the excuse—­’Dis am not last night, Policeman.  Dis am ‘nother day.’

Well:  but is the nightly tom-tom dance so much more absurd than the nightly ball, which is now considered an integral element of white civilisation?  A few centuries hence may not both of them be looked back on as equally sheer barbarisms?

These tom-tom dances are not easily seen.  The only glance I ever had of them was from the steep slope of once beautiful Belmont.  ‘Sitting on a hill apart,’ my host and I were discoursing, not ’of fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute,’ but of a question almost as mysterious—­the doings of the Parasol-ants who marched up and down their trackways past us, and whether these doings were guided by an intellect differing from ours, only in degree, but not in kind.  A hundred yards below we espied a dance in a negro garden; a few couples, mostly of women, pousetting to each other with violent and ungainly stampings, to the music of tom-tom and chac-chac, if music it can be called.  Some power over the emotions it must have; for the Negroes are said to be gradually maddened by it; and white people have told me that its very monotony, if listened to long, is strangely exciting, like the monotony of a bagpipe drone, or of a drum.  What more went on at the dance we could not see; and