And you’ll see that this is no Fable.
Phone 281 night or day
And you’ll hear what Gittens has to say.
He and his staff are always on hand
To accommodate any class of man.
“All orders will be promptly executed at MODERATE PRICES.
A TRIAL WILL CONVINCE.”
No doubt it would.
The Barbados government railway—one could not call it a railroad in so English a community—is an amusing little thing twenty years old and some two hours long, though that does not mean as much in miles as one might expect. On week-days its passenger-train sometimes makes a one-way journey, at a cost of four shillings and sixpence for first and two shillings for second-class travelers, but on Sundays it indulges in the whole round trip. From the station near the famous bridge from which the capital takes its name, the little train tears away as if excited at its own importance, through slightly rolling cane-fields, rocky white coral gullies, past frequent Dutchy windmills flailing their shadows on the ground. Vistas as broad as if it were crossing a continent instead of a tiny parcel of land flung far out into the ocean, spread on either hand, that to the right flat and almost desertlike in its aridity, the north broken in rugged low ridges, with many scattered villages and gray heaps of sugar-mills on their crests. The soil is so thin one marvels that it will grow anything, yet every acre of it shows signs of constant cultivation, the long expanses of cane broken here and there by small patches of corn, cassava, yams, and the sweet potatoes on which the mass of the population depends for nourishment. Every few minutes the train halts at a station seething with cheerful black faces; everywhere it crosses white coral roads, some of them cut deep down through the limestone ridges. Trees are almost plentiful, but they all show evidence of having been planted. The Spanish discoverers, it is said, gave the island its present name because its forests were bearded (barbudos) with what is known in our southern states as “Spanish moss,” but this, like the original woods, has long since disappeared.