LoupGarou Author:Eden Phillpotts General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: Sands Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select fr... more »om more than a million books for free. Excerpt: JANE AND JOHN. A NEGRO lay at full length upon the little wharf of Kingstown, St. Vincent, in the West Indies. He chewed a sugar-cane pensively, and gazed, with unspeculative eyes, at the blue waters of the Caribbean. John Diggle was a full-blooded African, and rather an exceptional specimen of his race, for he enjoyed the advantages of fine physical proportions and good looks also, judged from an Ethiopian standpoint . As he basked and blinked in the hot sunshine, his black skin, shining with a rich chocolate gloss, peeped from many a rent and rift in John's raiment; for he wore what he was pleased to consider his working clothes, albeit Mr. Diggle did extremely little work at the best and busiest of times. Now that Emancipation has made all men free in the fertile islands of the Western Indies, Quashie's labours are very limited. Two days of toil a week are sufficient to provide him with every necessity, and he has no ambition for luxuries. Give him a thatched cottage, peeping from between the great tattered leaves of plantain trees; add thereto a patch of land, where he may grow his sweet potatoes ; throw in a cocoa-nut palm, sufficient sugar-cane, and a wife to cherish or thrash, according to his humour, and your negro asks for nothing more. But John Diggle, while he owned most of these good things, and was the proud possessor of two mango trees into the bargain, yet lacked a helpmate; and while he sat upon the wharf and watched a shoal of fly ing-fish, flashing like little silver meteors in the bay as they fled and flew before greedy pursuers in sea and air, John sighe...« less