We have no better traveling companion today than Harry Franck. He has carried thousands of enthusiastic readers through South America, vagabonding down the Andes. As many more have gone joyously with him afoot in Spain. Now, as he takes us Roaming Through the West Indies, his clear-seeing eyes have registered various vivid closeups of life in lovely Porto Rico.

FOUR KINDS OF FEET

"We divide the people of Porto Rico into four categories for purposes of identification," said the American chief of the insular police, "according to the shape of their feet. The minority, mostly town dwellers, wear shoes. Of the great mass of country men, those with broad, flat feet live in the canelands around the coast. The coffee men have overdeveloped big toes, because they use them in climbing the steep hillsides from bush to bush. In the tobacco districts, where the planting is done with the feet, they are short .and stubby. It beats the Bertillon system all hollow."

The man bent on seeing the varying phases of Porto Rican life could not do better than adopt the chief's broad divisions of the population, for our overcrowded little Caribbean isle is a complex community, as complex in its way as its great stepmotherland. Small as it is, it contains a diversity of types that emphasizes the influence of occupation, immediate environment, even scenery, on the human family.

ROCKING CHAIR CONCERTS

San Juan, the capital, to give the shod minority the precedence, is compacted together on a small island of the north coast. It was a century old when the Dutch colonized New Amsterdam. Its Americanization consists chiefly of frequent fuentes de soda (soda fountains) in place of its bygone cafes, and a certain reflection of New York ways in its larger stores. Baseball, too, has come to stay. The central plaza on a Sunday evening has a few notes of uniqueness to the sated Latin-American traveler. The Porto Rican seems to like free play in his central squares. A few years ago a venturesome American Jew conceived the plan of providing concert-going San Juan with rocking chairs in place of the uncomfortable iron sillas (seats). While the municipal band renders its classical program with a moderate degree of skill, all San Juan rocks in unison with the leader's baton. Then suddenly one is aware of a tingling of the blood as the retrata ends with a number that brings all San Juan quickly to its feet, males uncovered, or standing stiffly at salute -- the Star-Spangled Banner.

PACKING-BOX HAMLETS

By Porto Rican law the entire beach of the island is government property for sixty feet back of the water's edge. As a consequence, what would in our own land be the choicest residential region is everywhere covered with squatters, who pay no rent, and patch their miserable little shelters together out of tin cans, old boxes, bits of driftwood, and yagua and palm-leaves, the interior walls covered, if at ail, with picked-up labels and illustrated newspapers. Aguadilla, the most typical town of Porto Rico, has much the same proportion between its favored few and its poverty-stricken many as the island itself. The ,hills come close down to the sea here, leaving little room for the pauper people of all Porto Rican suburbs. Hence those of Aguadilla have stacked their tiny shacks together in the narrow rocky canons between the mountain-flanked railroad and the sea-level.

So closely are these hundreds of human nests crowded that in many places even a thin man can pass between them only by advancing sidewise. Built of weather-blackened bits of boxes, most of them from "the States," with their addresses and trade-marks still upon them, they look far less like dwellings than abandoned kennels thrown into one great garbage heap. Of furnishing they have almost none, not even a chair to sit on in many cases. The occupants squat upon the floor, or, at best, take turns in the "hammock," a ragged gunnysack tied at both ends and stretched from corner to corner of the usually single room. The families are usually large, despite an appalling infant mortality, and half a dozen children without clothing enough between them to cover the smallest are almost certain to be squalling, quarreling, and rolling about the pieced-together floor or on the ground beneath it.