Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 February 1904 — LAZY MAN’S PARADIBE. [ARTICLE]

LAZY MAN’S PARADIBE.

The Women Are the Herd Worker* la the West indies. On market day In'the West 7 Indies thousands of peasant women and girls can be seen walking along the roads to the town from their ualm thatched huts in the mountains and Woods. They carry on their heads Immense loads of bananas, oranges, yams, plantains, brown sugar or tobacco, stepping along at the rate of miles an hour with the gait of a princess. Constant carrying of heavy loads gives them % splendid carriage. They will walk forty miles to market to sell 30 cents’ worth of produce. Often they could sell the same stuff for a better price at their homes, but they enjoy the merry company on the road and the fun and gossip of the market place too much to give up their weekly jaunt. Most people think such a tramp bard work, but they regard it as a picnic. Tramping along over rough mountain tracks, fording swift rivers, tugging fractious mules in the way that they should go, these women never let their loadß fall. They couid dance a Jig „without dropping them. Meanwhile the men folk, who have not even taken the trouble to sow or harvest the crops, much less carry them to market, are sleeping in the palm thatched hut or lying down in the yam patch outside and smoking the strong native tobacco. “On my estate,” said a coffee planter to an. American friend, “I employ about 600 people in the busy seasons. The women outnumber the men by more than two to one and do far better work, thongh they are only paid 18 cents a day as compared with the men’a 24 cents. The difference in wages is most unfair, but it is regulated by an iron bound custom.”—Kansas City Star.