Here the peasant laborers build their cabins; and, when there is no work for them on the plantations, they tend their gardens in a haphazard way. By working a little each day they manage to make a scant living.
Five months of the year they labor for their landlords, receiving about fifty cents a day.
The laborer is often paid in plantains. Fifty plantains are a day's pay. On this he feeds his family, for the plantain is the Puerto Rican peasant's bread.
The plantains left are taken to market and sold. One day a week is lost in this way, for the market is often twenty miles away.
Near a stream on the mountain side we see a group of women. Some of them are sitting on stones by the bank; others are standing in the hot sun in midstream, and all are washing.
It is wash day, and they have brought their clothes here to wash them.
They have no tubs, wash-boards, clothes-pins, or clothes-lines.
Sometimes they have no soap. In place of this, they use the seed or
roots of the soapberry tree.
The soap-seed tree bears several months in the year. The seed is inclosed in a yellow skin, and is black, and about the size of a marble. The leaf of a vine, called the soap vine is also used for the purpose of washing clothes.
The clothes are first soaked in the stream or pond, and then spread upon a broad, smooth stone; after which they are pounded with clubs or stones. When they are clean, they are spread out upon the bushes to dry and bleach.
[Illustration: COOKING THE EVENING MEAL.]
Then the tired women rest under the trees, and chat, and perhaps smoke until evening. When the hot sun has gone down in the west, they make their damp and dry clothes up into huge bundles, lift them to their heads, and plod homeward.