be necessary to my interests that I should get once more in touch with
negro feeling, since I had returned to my home in Cuba after the
upheavals in '98. Very well.

"The manager of my estate, a capable man, was of opinion that there
existed a secret organization amongst the native labourers operating--
you understand?--against my interests. He produced certain evidences
of this. They were not convincing; and all my enquiries and
examinations of certain inhabitants led to no definite results. Yet I
grew more and more to feel that enemies surrounded me."

He paused to light his third cigarette, and whilst he did so I conjured
up a mental picture of his "examinations of certain inhabitants." I
recalled hazily those stories of Spanish mismanagement and cruelty
which had directly led to United States interferences in the islands.
But whilst I could well believe that this man's life had not been safe
in those bad old days in the West Indies, I found it difficult to
suppose that a native plot against his safety could have survived for
more than twenty years and have come to a climax in England. However, I
realized that there was more to follow, and presently, having lighted
his cigarette, the Colonel resumed:

"In the neighbourhood of the hacienda which had once been my official
residence there was a belt of low-lying pest country--you understand
pest country?--which was a hot-bed of poisonous diseases. It followed
the winding course of a nearly stagnant creek. From the earliest times
the Black Belt--it was so called--had been avoided by European
inhabitants, and indeed by the coloured population as well. Apart from
the malaria of the swampy ground it was infested with reptiles and with
poisonous insects of a greater variety and of a more venomous character