Page:A Study in Colour - Augusta Zelia Fraser.pdf/19

8 when you left us, and had gone home to dear old England, I thought still more.

As I pondered I began to regard with a new interest the dusky servants that came and went about the house. The servant question is to the full as engrossing a topic in the West Indies as at home, but it was not from a domestic, but from a human point of view that I was considering them.

Gradually I made friends with them; I found they were only too willing to talk about themselves, when once their first constraint was over, and they realised that I was truly interested in their histories; and as they talked there broke on me glimpses of a life so strange and fantastic, that at first I could hardly realize its existence.

Elita was a coloured girl of whom I heard a great deal from many of the servants. She was quite a beauty among her own people, and her tragical fate was spoken of with the greatest regret. I wrote her story out exactly as they told it to me.

I used to read what I had written, with, of course, certain reservations, to some of the servants afterwards, and they were delighted at hearing