Thomas Hardy in one of his novels makes his heroine earn her own living by telling stories in the fashionable houses in London. Word comes that Miss Pamela Coleman Smith, whose portrait in fantasitic costume is represented here, has taken up the suggestion and is appearing with success in London drawing-rooms as the teller of her own versions of Jamaican folk-tales, published under the title of "Annancy Stories".

These tales were learned by Miss Smith from her nurse during the years of her residence as a child in Jamaica, and her retension of the dialect gives her a particular advantage in this kind of recitation. At the moment her "turn" is announced, a man-servant brings in a folding board about four feet long and places it upon the floor. Miss Smith, dressed in a brilliant orange gown with a red turban, sits tailor-fashion upon the board, while before her are arranged two candles to serve as footlights.

While she tells the stories of "Annancy", the spider-man, or of "Recundadundardrumunday", the witch, whose very mention sends joyously fearful shivers through the little Jamaican children, or while she recounts the clever tricks and quaint sayings of "Gingy Fly", the blue-bottle, she manipulates little figures cut from paste-board and gaudily painted, that play a part in the weird legends.

Miss Smith has told her stories at Windsor to the great amusement of Princess Christian. Her audiences are sometimes puzzled by the bizarre effect of these tales. One old lady, solicitous of the reciter's apiritual welfare, offered to present her a Bible; and another, whose insularity found it difficult to cope with the present flood of foreign ideas, asked at the close of an evening's entertainment, "Do they really speak like that in Japan?"