colours.  The Oriental instinct for harmonious hues, and those at 
once rich and sober, such as may be seen in Indian shawls, is very 
observable even in these Coolies, low-caste as most of them are.  
There were bangles and jewels among them in plenty; and as it was a 
high day and a holiday, the women had taken out the little gold or 
silver stoppers in their pierced nostrils, and put in their place 
the great gold ring which hangs down over the mouth, and is 
considered by them, as learned men tell us it was by Rebekah at the 
well, a special ornament.  The men stood by themselves; the women by 
themselves; the children grouped in front; and a merrier, healthier, 
shrewder looking party I have seldom seen.  Complaints there were 
none.  All seemed to look on the Squire as a father, and each face 
brightened when he spoke to them by name.  But the great ceremony 
was the distributing by the Governor of red and yellow sweetmeats to 
the children out of a huge dish held up by the Hindoo butler, while 
Franky, in a long night-shirt of crimson cotton velvet, acted as 
aide-de-camp, and took his perquisites freely.  Each of the little 
brown darlings got its share, the boys putting them into the flap of 
their waistcloths, the girls into the front of their veils; and some 
of the married women seemed ready enough to follow the children's 
example; some of them, indeed, were little more than children 
themselves.  The pleasure of the men at the whole ceremony was very 
noticeable, and very pleasant.  Well fed, well cared for, well 
taught (when they will allow themselves to be so), and with a local 
medical man appointed for their special benefit, Coolies under such 
a master ought to be, and are, prosperous and happy.  Exceptions 
there are, and must be.  Are there none among the workmen of English 
manufacturers and farmers?  Abuses may spring up, and do.  Do none 
spring up in London and elsewhere?  But the Government has the power 
to interfere, and uses that power.  These poor people are 
sufficiently protected by law from their white employers; what they 
need most is protection for the newcomers against the usury, or 
swindling, by people of their own race, especially Hindoos of the 
middle class, who are covetous and ill-disposed, and who use their 
experience of the island for their own selfish advantage.  But that 
evil also Government is doing its best to put down.  Already the 
Coolies have a far larger amount of money in the savings' banks of 
the island than the Negroes; and their prosperity can be safely 
trusted to wise and benevolent laws, enforced by men who can afford 
to stand above public opinion, as well as above private interest.  I 
speak, of course, only of Trinidad, because only Trinidad I have 
seen.  But what I say I know intimately to be true.

The parade over--and a pleasant sight it was, and one not easily to 
be forgotten--we were away to see the Salse, or 'mud-volcano,' near 
Monkey Town, in the forest to the south-east.  The cross-roads were 
deep in mud, all the worse because it was beginning to dry on the 
surface, forming a tough crust above the hasty-pudding which, if 
broken through, held the horse's leg suspended as in a vice, and 
would have thrown him down, if it were possible to throw down a 
West-Indian horse.  We passed in one place a quaint little relic of 
the older world; a small sugar-press, rather than mill, under a roof 
of palm-leaf, which was worked by hand, or a donkey, just as a 
Spanish settler would have worked it three hundred years ago.  Then 
on through plenty of garden cultivation, with all the people at 
their doors as we passed, fat and grinning:  then up to a good high-
road, and a school for Coolies, kept by a Presbyterian clergyman, 
Mr. Morton--I must be allowed to mention his name--who, like a 
sensible man, wore a white coat instead of the absurd regulation 
black one, too much affected by all well-to-do folk, lay as well as 
clerical, in the West Indies.  The school seemed good enough in all 
ways.  A senior class of young men--including one who had had his 
head nearly cut off last year by misapplication of that formidable 
weapon the cutlass, which every coloured man and woman carries in 
the West Indies--could read pretty well; and the smaller children--
with as much clothing on as they could be persuaded to wear--were a 
sight pleasant to see.  Among them, by the by, was a little lady who 
excited my astonishment.  She was, I was told, twelve years old.  
She sat summing away on her slate, bedizened out in gauze petticoat, 
velvet jacket--between which and the petticoat, of course, the waist 
showed just as nature had made it--gauze veil, bangles, necklace, 
nose-jewel; for she was a married woman, and her Papa (Anglice, 
husband) wished her to look her best on so important an occasion.

This over-early marriage among the Coolies is a very serious evil, 
but one which they have brought with them from their own land.  The 
girls are practically sold by their fathers while yet children, 
often to wealthy men much older than they.  Love is out of the 
question.  But what if the poor child, as she grows up, sees some 
one, among that overplus of men, to whom she, for the first time in 
her life, takes a fancy?  Then comes a scandal; and one which is 
often ended swiftly enough by the cutlass.  Wife-murder is but too 
common among these Hindoos, and they cannot be made to see that it 
is wrong.  'I kill my own wife.  Why not?  I kill no other man's 
wife,' was said by as pretty, gentle, graceful a lad of two-and-
twenty as one need see; a convict performing, and perfectly, the 
office of housemaid in a friend's house.  There is murder of wives, 
or quasi-wives now and then, among the baser sort of Coolies--murder 
because a poor girl will not give her ill-earned gains to the 
ruffian who considers her as his property.  But there is also law in 
Trinidad, and such offences do not go unpunished.

Then on through Savanna Grande and village again, and past more 
sugar estates, and past beautiful bits of forest, left, like English 
woods, standing in the cultivated fields.  One batch of a few acres 
on the side of a dell was very lovely.  Huge Figuiers and Huras were 
mingled with palms and rich undergrowth, and lighted up here and 
there with purple creepers.

So we went on, and on, and into the thick forest, and what was, till 
Sir Ralph Woodford taught the islanders what an European road was 
like, one of the pattern royal roads of the island.  Originally an 
Indian trace, it had been widened by the Spaniards, and transformed 
from a line of mud six feet broad to one of thirty.  The only 
pleasant reminiscence which I have about it was the finding in 
flower a beautiful parasite, undescribed by Griesbach; {192} a 'wild 
pine' with a branching spike of crimson flowers, purple tipped, 
which shone in the darkness of the bush like a great bunch of 
rosebuds growing among lily-leaves.

The present Governor, like Sir Ralph Woodford before him, has been 
fully aware of the old saying--which the Romans knew well, and which 
the English did not know, and only rediscovered some century since--
that the 'first step in civilisation is to make roads; the second, 
to make more roads; and the third, to make more roads still.'

Through this very district (aided by men whose talents he had the 
talent to discover and employ) he has run wide, level, and sound 
roads, either already completed or in progress, through all parts of 
the island which I visited, save the precipitous glens of the 
northern shore.

Of such roads we saw more than one in the next few days.  That day 
we had to commit ourselves, when we turned off the royal road, to 
one of the old Spanish-Indian jungle tracks.  And here is a recipe 
for making one:--Take a railway embankment of average steepness, 
strew it freely with wreck, rigging and all, to imitate the fallen 
timber, roots, and lianes--a few flagstones and boulders here and 
there will be quite in place; plant the whole with the thickest 
pheasant-cover; set a field of huntsmen to find their way through it 
at the points of least resistance three times a week during a wet 
winter; and if you dare follow their footsteps, you will find a very 
accurate imitation of a forest-track in the wet season.

At one place we seemed to be fairly stopped.  We plunged and slid 
down into a muddy brook, luckily with a gravel bar on which the 
horses could stand, at least one by one; and found opposite us a 
bank of smooth clay, bound with slippery roots, some ten feet high.  
We stood and looked at it, and the longer we looked--in hunting 
phrase--the less we liked it.  But there was no alternative.  Some 
one jumped off, and scrambled up on his hands and knees; his horse 
was driven up the bank to him--on its knees, likewise, more than 
once--and caught staggering among boughs and mud; and by the time 
the whole cavalcade was over, horses and men looked as if they had 
been brickmaking for a week.

But here again the cunning of these horses surprised me.  On one 
very steep pitch, for instance, I saw before me two logs across the 
path, two feet and more in diameter, and what was worse, not two 
feet apart.  How the brown cob meant to get over I could not guess; 
but as he seemed not to falter or turn tail, as an English horse 
would have done, I laid the reins on his neck and watched his legs.  
To my astonishment, he lifted a fore-leg out of the abyss of mud, 
put it between the logs, where I expected to hear it snap; clawed in 
front, and shuffled behind; put the other over the second log, the 
mud and water splashing into my face, and then brought the first 
freely out from between the logs, and--horrible to see--put a hind 
one in.  Thus did he fairly walk through the whole; stopped a moment 
to get his breath; and then staggered and scrambled upward again, as 
if he had done nothing remarkable.  Coming back, by the by, those 
two logs lay heavy on my heart for a mile ere I neared them.  He 
might get up over them; but how would he get down again?  And I was 
not surprised to hear more than one behind me say, 'I think I shall 
lead over.'  But being in front, if I fell, I could only fall into 
the mud, and not on the top of a friend.  So I let the brown cob do 
what he would, determined to see how far a tropic horse's legs could 
keep him up; and, to my great amusement, he quietly leapt the whole, 
descending five or six feet into a pool of mud, which shot out over 
him and me, half blinding us for the moment; then slid away on his 
haunches downward; picked himself up; and went on as usual, solemn, 
patient, and seemingly stupid as any donkey.

We had some difficulty in finding our quest, the Salse, or mud-
volcano.  But at last, out of a hut half buried in verdure on the 
edge of a little clearing, there tumbled the quaintest little old 
black man, cutlass in hand, and, without being asked, went on ahead 
as our guide.  Crook-backed, round-shouldered, his only dress a 
ragged shirt and ragged pair of drawers, he had evidently thriven 
upon the forest life for many a year.  He did not walk nor run, but 
tumbled along in front of us, his bare feet plashing from log to log 
and mud-heap to mud-heap, his gray woolly head wagging right and 
left, and his cutlass brushing almost instinctively at every bough 
he passed, while he turned round every moment to jabber something, 
usually in Creole French, which, of course, I could not understand.

He led us well, up and down, and at last over a flat of rich muddy 
ground, full of huge trees, and of their roots likewise, where there 
was no path at all.  The solitude was awful; so was the darkness of 
the shade; so was the stifling heat; and right glad we were when we 
saw an opening in the trees, and the little man quickened his pace, 
and stopped with an air of triumph not unmixed with awe on the edge 
of a circular pool of mud and water some two or three acres in 
extent.

'Dere de debbil's woodyard,' said he, with somewhat bated breath.  
And no wonder; for a more doleful, uncanny, half-made spot I never 
saw.  The sad forest ringed it round with a green wall, feathered 
down to the ugly mud, on which, partly perhaps from its saltness, 
partly from the changeableness of the surface, no plant would grow, 
save a few herbs and creepers which love the brackish water.  Only 
here and there an Echites had crawled out of the wood and lay along 
the ground, its long shoots gay with large cream-coloured flowers 
and pairs of glossy leaves; and on it, and on some dead brushwood, 
grew a lovely little parasitic Orchis, an Oncidium, with tiny fans 
of leaves, and flowers like swarms of yellow butterflies.

There was no track of man, not even a hunter's footprint; but 
instead, tracks of beasts in plenty.  Deer, quenco, {194a} and lapo, 
{194b} with smaller animals, had been treading up and down, probably 
attracted by the salt water.  They were safe enough, the old man 
said.  No hunter dare approach the spot.  There were 'too much 
jumbies' here; and when one of the party expressed a wish to lie out 
there some night, in the hope of good shooting, the Negro shook his 
head.  He would 'not do that for all the world.  De debbil come out 
here at night, and walk about;' and he was much scandalised when the 
young gentleman rejoined that the chance of such a sight would be an 
additional reason for bivouacking there.

So we walked out upon the mud, which was mostly hard enough, past 
shallow pools of brackish water, smelling of asphalt, toward a group 
of little mud-volcanoes on the farther side.  These curious openings 
into the nether-world are not permanent.  They choke up after a 
while, and fresh ones appear in another part of the area, thus 
keeping the whole clear of plants.

They are each some two or three feet high, of the very finest mud, 
which leaves no feeling of grit on the fingers or tongue, and dries, 
of course, rapidly in the sun.  On the top, or near the top, of each 
is a round hole, a finger's breadth, polished to exceeding 
smoothness, and running down through the cone as far as we could 
dig.  From each oozes perpetually, with a clicking noise of gas-
bubbles, water and mud; and now and then, losing their temper, they 
spirt out their dirt to a considerable height; a feat which we did 
not see performed, but which is so common that we were in something 
like fear and trembling while we opened a cone with our cutlasses.  
For though we could hardly have been made dirtier than we were, an 
explosion in our faces of mud with 'a faint bituminous smell,' and 
impregnated with 'common salt, a notable proportion of iodine, and a 
trace of carbonate of soda and carbonate of lime,' {195} would have 
been both unpleasant and humiliating.  But the most puzzling thing 
about the place is, that out of the mud comes up--not jumbies, but--
a multitude of small stones, like no stones in the neighbourhood; we 
found concretions of iron sand, and scales which seemed to have 
peeled off them; and pebbles, quartzose, or jasper, or like in 
appearance to flint; but all evidently long rolled on a sea-beach.  
Messrs. Wall and Sawkins mention pyrites and gypsum as being found:  
but we saw none, as far as I recollect.  All these must have been 
carried up from a considerable depth by the force of the same gases 
which make the little mud-volcanoes.

Now and then this 'Salse,' so quiet when we saw it, is said to be 
seized with a violent paroxysm.  Explosions are heard, and large 
discharges of mud, and even flame, are said to appear.  Some 
seventeen years ago (according to Messrs. Wall and Sawkins) such an 
explosion was heard six miles off; and next morning the surface was 
found quite altered, and trees had disappeared, or been thrown down.  
But--as they wisely say--the reports of the inhabitants must be 
received with extreme caution.  In the autumn of last year, some 
such explosion is said to have taken place at the Cedros Salse, a 
place so remote, unfortunately, that I could not visit it.  The 
Negroes and Coolies, the story goes, came running to the overseer at 
the noise, assuring him that something terrible had happened; and 
when he, in defiance of their fears, went off to the Salse, he found 
that many tons of mud--I was told thousands--had been thrown out.  
How true this may be, I cannot say.  But Messrs. Wall and Sawkins 
saw with their own eyes, in 1856, about two miles from this Cedros 
Salse, the results of an explosion which had happened only two 
months before, and of which they give a drawing.  A surface two 
hundred feet round had been upheaved fifteen feet, throwing the 
trees in every direction; and the sham earthquake had shaken the 
ground for two hundred or three hundred yards round, till the 
natives fancied that their huts were going to fall.

There is a third Salse near Poole River, on the Upper Ortoire, which 
is extinct, or at least quiescent; but this, also, I could not 
visit.  It is about seventeen miles from the sea, and about two 
hundred feet above it.  As for the causes of these Salses, I fear 
the reader must be content, for the present, with a somewhat muddy 
explanation of the muddy mystery.  Messrs. Wall and Sawkins are 
inclined to connect it with asphalt springs and pitch lakes.  'There 
is,' they say, 'easy gradation from the smaller Salses to the 
ordinary naphtha or petroleum springs.'  It is certain that in the 
production of asphalt, carbonic acid, carburetted hydrogen, and 
water are given off.  'May not,' they ask, 'these orifices be the 
vents by which such gases escape?  And in forcing their way to the 
surface, is it not natural that the liquid asphalt and slimy water 
should be drawn up and expelled?'  They point out the fact, that 
wherever such volcanoes exist, asphalt or petroleum is found hard 
by.  The mud volcanoes of Turbaco, in New Granada, famous from 
Humboldt's description of them, lie in an asphaltic country.  They 
are much larger than those of Trinidad, the cones being, some of 
them, twenty feet high.  When Humboldt visited them in 1801, they 
gave off hardly anything save nitrogen gas.  But in the year 1850, a 
'bituminous odour' had begun to be diffused; asphaltic oil swam on 
the surface of the small openings; and the gas issuing from any of 
the cones could be ignited.  Dr. Daubeny found the mud-volcanoes of 
Macaluba giving out bitumen, and bubbles of carbonic acid and 
carburetted hydrogen.  The mud-volcano of Saman, in the Western 
Caucasus, gives off, with a continual stream of thick mud, ignited 
gases, accompanied with mimic earthquakes like those of the Trinidad 
Salses; and this out of a soil said to be full of bituminous 
springs, and where (as in Trinidad) the tertiary strata carry veins 
of asphalt, or are saturated with naphtha.  At the famous sacred 
Fire wells of Baku, in the Eastern Caucasus, the ejections of mud 
and inflammable gas are so mixed with asphaltic products that 
Eichwald says 'they should be rather called naphtha volcanoes than 
mud-volcanoes, as the eruptions always terminate in a large emission 
of naphtha.'

It is reasonable enough, then, to suppose a similar connection in 
Trinidad.  But whence come, either in Trinidad or at Turbaco, the 
sea-salts and the iodine?  Certainly not from the sea itself, which 
is distant, in the case of the Trinidad Salses, from two to 
seventeen miles.  It must exist already in the strata below.  And 
the ejected pebbles, which are evidently sea-worn, must form part of 
a tertiary sea-beach, covered by sands, and covering, perhaps, in 
its turn, vegetable debris which, as it is converted into asphalt, 
thrusts the pebbles up to the surface.

We had to hurry away from the strange place; for night was falling 
fast, or rather ready to fall, as always here, in a moment, without 
twilight, and we were scarce out of the forest before it was dark.  
The wild game were already moving, and a deer crossed our line of 
march, close before one of the horses.  However, we were not 
benighted; for the sun was hardly down ere the moon rose, bright and 
full; and we floundered home through the mud, to start again next 
morning into mud again.  Through rich rolling land covered with 
cane; past large sugar-works, where crop-time and all its bustle was 
just beginning; along a tramway, which made an excellent horse-road, 
and then along one of the new roads, which are opening up the yet 
untouched riches of this island.  In this district alone, thirty-six 
miles of good road and thirty bridges have been made, where formerly 
there were only two abominable bridle-paths.  It was a solid 
pleasure to see good engineering round the hillsides; gullies, which 
but a year or two before were break-neck scrambles into fords often 
impassable after all, bridged with baulks of incorruptible timber, 
on piers sunk, to give a hold in that sea of hasty pudding, sixteen 
feet below the river-bed; and side supports sunk as far into the 
banks; a solid pleasure to congratulate the warden (who had joined 
us) on his triumphs, and to hear how he had sought for miles around 
in the hasty-pudding sea, ere he could find either gravel or stone 
for road metal, and had found it after all; or how in places, 
finding no stone at all, he had been forced to metal the way with 
burnt clay, which, as I can testify, is an excellent substitute; or 
how again he had coaxed and patted the too-comfortable natives into 
being well paid for doing the very road-making which, if they had 
any notion of their own interests, they would combine to do for 
themselves.  And so we rode on chatting,


'While all the land,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing breeze,
Smelt of the coming summer;'


for it was winter then, and only 80 degrees in the shade, till the 
road entered the virgin forest, through which it has been driven, on 
the American principle of making land valuable by beginning with a 
road, and expecting settlers to follow it.  Some such settlers we 
found, clearing right and left; among them a most satisfactory 
sight; namely, more than one Coolie family, who had served their 
apprenticeship, saved money, bought Government land, and set up as 
yeomen; the foundation, it is to be hoped, of a class of intelligent 
and civilised peasant proprietors.  These men, as soon as they have 
cleared as much land as their wives and children, with their help, 
can keep in order, go off, usually, in gangs of ten to fifteen, to 
work, in many instances, on the estates from which they originally 
came.  This fact practically refutes the opinion which was at first 
held by some attorneys and managers of sugar-estates, that the 
settling of free Indian immigrants would materially affect the 
labour supply of the colony.  I must express an earnest hope that 
neither will any planters be short-sighted enough to urge such a 
theory on the present Governor, nor will the present Governor give 
ear to it.  The colony at large must gain by the settlement of Crown 
lands by civilised people like the Hindoos, if it be only through 
the increased exports and imports; while the sugar-estates will 
become more and more sure of a constant supply of labour, without 
the heavy expense of importing fresh immigrants.  I am assured that 
the only expense to the colony is the fee for survey, amounting to 
eighteen dollars for a ten-acre allotment, as the Coolie prefers the 
thinly-wooded and comparatively poor lands, from the greater 
facility of clearing them; and these lands are quite unsaleable to 
other customers.  Therefore, for less than 4 pounds, an acclimatised 
Indian labourer with his family (and it must be remembered that, 
while the Negro families increase very slowly, the Coolies increase 
very rapidly, being more kind and careful parents) are permanently 
settled in the colony, the man to work five days a week on sugar-
estates, the family to grow provisions for the market, instead of 
being shipped back to India at a cost, including gratuities and 
etceteras, of not less than 50 pounds.

One clearing we reached--were I five-and-twenty I should like to 
make just such another next to it--of a higher class still.  A 
cultivated Scotchman, now no longer young, but hale and mighty, had 
taken up three hundred acres, and already cleared a hundred and 
fifty; and there he intended to pass the rest of a busy life, not 
under his own vine and fig-tree, but under his own castor-oil and 
cacao-tree.  We were welcomed by as noble a Scot's face as I ever 
saw, and as keen a Scot's eye; and taken in and fed, horses and men, 
even too sumptuously, in a palm and timber house.  Then we wandered 
out to see the site of his intended mansion, with the rich wooded 
hills of the Latagual to the north, and all around the unbroken 
forest, where, he told us, the howling monkeys shouted defiance 
morning and evening at him who did


'Invade their ancient solitary reign.'


Then we went down to see the Coolie barracks, where the folk seemed 
as happy and well cared for as they were certain to be under such a 
master; then down a rocky pool in the river, jammed with bare white 
logs (as in some North American forest), which had been stopped in 
flood by one enormous trunk across the stream; then back past the 
site of the ajoupa which had been our host's first shelter, and 
which had disappeared by a cause strange enough to English ears.  An 
enormous silk-cotton near by was felled, in spite of the Negroes' 
fears.  Its boughs, when it fell, did not reach the ajoupa by twenty 
feet or more; but the wind of its fall did, and blew the hut clean 
away.  This may sound like a story out of Munchausen:  but there was 
no doubt of the fact; and to us who saw the size of the tree which 
did the deed it seemed probable enough.

We rode away again, and into the 'Morichal,' the hills where Moriche 
palms are found; to see certain springs and a certain tree; and well 
worth seeing they were.  Out of the base of a limestone hill, amid 
delicate ferns, under the shade of enormous trees, a clear pool 
bubbled up and ran away, a stream from its very birth, as is the 
wont of limestone springs.  It was a spot fit for a Greek nymph; at 
least for an Indian damsel:  but the nymph who came to draw water in 
a tin bucket, and stared stupidly and saucily at us, was anything 
but Greek, or even Indian, either in costume or manners.  Be it so.  
White men are responsible for her being there; so white men must not 
complain.  Then we went in search of the tree.  We had passed, as we 
rode up, some Huras (Sandbox-trees) which would have been considered 
giants in England; and I had been laughed at more than once for 
asking, 'Is that the tree, or that?'  I soon knew why.  We scrambled 
up a steep bank of broken limestone, through ferns and Balisiers, 
for perhaps a hundred feet; and then were suddenly aware of a bole 
which justified the saying of one of our party--that, when surveying 
for a road he had come suddenly on it, he 'felt as if he had run 
against a church tower.'  It was a Hura, seemingly healthy, 
undecayed, and growing vigorously.  Its girth--we measured it 
carefully--was forty-four feet, six feet from the ground, and as I 
laid my face against it and looked up, I seemed to be looking up a 
ship's side.  It was perfectly cylindrical, branchless, and smooth, 
save, of course, the tiny prickles which beset the bark, for a 
height at which we could not guess, but which we luckily had an 
opportunity of measuring.  A wild pine grew in the lowest fork, and 
had kindly let down an air-root into the soil.  We tightened the 
root, set it perpendicular, cut it off exactly where it touched the 
ground, and then pulled carefully till we brought the plant and half 
a dozen more strange vegetables down on our heads.  The length of 
the air-root was just seventy-five feet.  Some twenty feet or more 
above that first fork was a second fork; and then the tree began.  
Where its head was we could not see.  We could only, by laying our 
faces against the bole and looking up, discern a wilderness of 
boughs carrying a green cloud of leaves, most of them too high for 
us to discern their shape without the glasses.  We walked up the 
slope, and round about, in hopes of seeing the head of the tree 
clear enough to guess at its total height:  but in vain.  It was 
only when we had ridden some half mile up the hill that we could 
discern its masses rising, a bright green mound, above the darker 
foliage of the forest.  It looked of any height, from one hundred 
and fifty to two hundred feet; less it could hardly be.  'It made,' 
says a note by one of our party, 'other huge trees look like 
shrubs.'  I am not surprised that my friend Mr. St. Luce D'Abadie, 
who measured the tree since my departure, found it to be one hundred 
and ninety-two feet in height.

I was assured that there were still larger trees in the island.  A 
certain Locust-tree and a Ceiba were mentioned.  The Moras, too, of 
the southern hills, were said to be far taller.  And I can well 
believe it; for if huge trees were as shrubs beside that Sandbox, it 
would be a shrub by the side of those Locusts figured by Spix and 
Martius, which fifteen Indians with outstretched arms could just 
embrace.  At the bottom they were eighty-four feet round, and sixty 
where the boles became cylindrical.  By counting the rings of such 
parts as could be reached, they arrived at the conclusion that they 
were of the age of Homer, and 332 years old in the days of 
Pythagoras.  One estimate, indeed, reduced their antiquity to 2052 
years old; while another (counting, I presume, two rings of fresh 
wood for every year) carried it up to 4104.

So we rode on and up the hills, by green and flowery paths, with 
here and there a cottage and a garden, and groups of enormous 
Palmistes towering over the tree-tops in every glen, talking over 
that wondrous weed, whose head we saw still far below.  For weed it 
is, and nothing more.  The wood is soft and almost useless, save for 
firing; and the tree itself, botanists tell us, is neither more nor 
less than a gigantic Spurge, the cousin-german of the milky garden 
weeds with which boys burn away their warts.  But if the modern 
theory be true, that when we speak (as we are forced to speak) of 
the relationships of plants, we use no metaphor, but state an actual 
fact; that the groups into which we are forced to arrange them 
indicate not merely similarity of type, but community of descent--
then how wonderful is the kindred between the Spurge and the Hura--
indeed, between all the members of the Euphorbiaceous group, so 
fantastically various in outward form; so abundant, often huge, in 
the Tropics, while in our remote northern island their only 
representatives are a few weedy Spurges, two Dog's Mercuries--weeds 
likewise--and the Box.  Wonderful it is if only these last have had 
the same parentage--still more if they have had the same parentage, 
too, with forms so utterly different from them as the prickly-
stemmed scarlet-flowered Euphorbia common in our hothouses; as the 
huge succulent cactus-like Euphorbia of the Canary Islands; as the 
gale-like Phyllanthus; the many-formed Crotons, which in the West 
Indies alone comprise, according to Griesbach, at least twelve 
genera and thirty species; the hemp-like Maniocs, Physic-nuts, 
Castor-oils; the scarlet Poinsettia which adorns dinner-tables in 
winter; the pretty little pink and yellow Dalechampia, now common in 
hothouses; the Manchineel, with its glossy poplar-like leaves; and 
this very Hura, with leaves still more like a poplar, and a fruit 
which differs from most of its family in having not three but many 
divisions, usually a multiple of three up to fifteen; a fruit which 
it is difficult to obtain, even where the tree is plentiful:  for 
hanging at the end of long branches, it bursts when ripe with a 
crack like a pistol, scattering its seeds far and wide:  from whence 
its name of Hura crepitans.

But what if all these forms are the descendants of one original 
form?  Would that be one whit more wonderful, more inexplicable, 
than the theory that they were each and all, with their minute and 
often imaginary shades of difference, created separately and at 
once?  But if it be--which I cannot allow--what can the theologian 
say, save that God's works are even more wonderful than we always 
believed them to be?  As for the theory being impossible:  who are 
we, that we should limit the power of God?  'Is anything too hard 
for the Lord?' asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask 
it as long as time shall last.  If it be said that natural selection 
is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety:  we always 
knew that God works by very simple, or seemingly simple, means; that 
the universe, as far as we could discern it, was one organisation of 
the most simple means; it was wonderful (or ought to have been) in 
our eyes, that a shower of rain should make the grass grow, and that 
the grass should become flesh, and the flesh food for the thinking 
brain of man; it was (or ought to have been) yet more wonderful in 
our eyes, that a child should resemble its parents, or even a 
butterfly resemble--if not always, still usually--its parents 
likewise.  Ought God to appear less or more august in our eyes if we 
discover that His means are even simpler than we supposed?  We hold 
Him to be almighty and allwise.  Are we to reverence Him less or 
more if we find that His might is greater, His wisdom deeper, than 
we had ever dreamed?  We believed that His care was over all His 
works; that His providence watched perpetually over the universe.  
We were taught, some of us at least, by Holy Scripture, to believe 
that the whole history of the universe was made up of special 
providences:  if, then, that should be true which Mr. Darwin says--
'It may be metaphorically said that natural selection is daily and 
hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the 
slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all 
that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever 
opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in 
relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life,'--if this, 
I say, were proved to be true, ought God's care, God's providence, 
to seem less or more magnificent in our eyes?  Of old it was said by 
Him without whom nothing is made--'My Father worketh hitherto, and I 
work.'  Shall we quarrel with physical science, if she gives us 
evidence that these words are true?  And if it should be proven that 
the gigantic Hura and the lowly Spurge sprang from one common 
ancestor, what would the orthodox theologian have to say to it, 
saving--'I always knew that God was great:  and I am not surprised 
to find Him greater than I thought Him'?

So much for the giant weed of the Morichal, from which we rode on 
and up through rolling country growing lovelier at every step, and 
turned out of our way to see wild pine-apples in a sandy spot, or 
'Arenal' in a valley beneath.  The meeting of the stiff marl and the 
fine sand was abrupt, and well marked by the vegetation.  On one 
side of the ravine the tall fan-leaved Carats marked the rich soil; 
on the other, the sand and gravel loving Cocorites appeared at once, 
crowding their ostrich plumes together.  Most of them were the 
common species of the island {202a} in which the pinnae of the 
leaves grow in fours and fives, and at different angles from the 
leaf-stalk, giving the whole a brushy appearance, which takes off 
somewhat from the perfectness of its beauty.  But among them we saw-
-for the first and last time in the forest--a few of a far more 
beautiful species, {202b} common on the mainland.  In it, the pinnae 
are set on all at the same distance apart, and all in the same 
plane, in opposite sides of the stalk, giving to the whole foliage a 
grand simplicity; and producing, when the curving leaf-points toss 
in the breeze, that curious appearance, which I mentioned in an 
earlier chapter, of green glass wheels with rapidly revolving 
spokes.  At their feet grew the pine-apples, only in flower or 
unripe fruit, so that we could not quench our thirst with them, and 
only looked with curiosity at the small wild type of so famous a 
plant.  But close by, and happily nearly ripe, we found a fair 
substitute for pine-apples in the fruit of the Karatas.  This form 
of Bromelia, closely allied to the Pinguin of which hedges are made, 
bears a straggling plume of prickly leaves, six or eight feet long 
each, close to the ground.  The forester looks for a plant in which 
the leaves droop outwards--a sign that the fruit is ripe.  After 
beating it cautiously (for snakes are very fond of coiling under its 
shade) he opens the centre, and finds, close to the ground, a group 
of whitish fruits, nearly two inches long; peels carefully off the 
skin, which is beset with innumerable sharp hairs, and eats the 
sour-sweet refreshing pulp:  but not too often, for there are always 
hairs enough left to make the tongue bleed if more than one or two 
are eaten.

With lips somewhat less parched, we rode away again to see the sight 
of the day; and a right pleasant sight it was.  These Montserrat 
hills had been, within the last three years, almost the most lawless 
and neglected part of the island.  Principally by the energy and 
tact of one man, the wild inhabitants had been conciliated, brought 
under law, and made to pay their light taxes, in return for a safety 
and comfort enjoyed perhaps by no other peasants on earth.

A few words on the excellent system, which bids fair to establish in 
this colony a thriving and loyal peasant proprietary.  Up to 1847 
Crown lands were seldom alienated.  In that year a price was set 
upon them, and persons in illegal occupation ordered to petition for 
their holdings.  Unfortunately, though a time was fixed for 
petitioning, no time was fixed for paying; and consequently the vast 
majority of petitioners never took any further steps in the matter.  
Unfortunately, too, the price fixed--2 pounds per acre--was too 
high; and squatting went on much as before.

It appeared to the late Governor that this evil would best be dealt 
with experimentally and locally; and he accordingly erected the 
chief squatting district, Montserrat, into a ward, giving the warden 
large discretionary powers as Commissioner of Crown lands.  The 
price of Crown lands was reduced, in 1869, to 1 pounds per acre; and 
the Montserrat system extended, as far as possible, to other wards; 
a movement which the results fully justified.

In 1867 there were in Montserrat 400 squatters, holding lands of 
from 3 to 120 acres, planted with cacao, coffee, or provisions.  
Some of the cacao plantations were valued at 1000 pounds.  These 
people lived without paying taxes, and almost without law or 
religion.  The Crown woods had been, of course, sadly plundered by 
squatters, and by others who should have known better.  At every 
turn magnificent cedars might have been seen levelled by the axe, 
only a few feet of the trunk being used to make boards and shingles, 
while the greater part was left to rot or burn.  These 
irregularities have been now almost stopped; and 266 persons, in 
Montserrat alone, have taken out grants of land, some of 400 acres.  
But this by no means represents the number of purchasers, as nearly 
an equal number have paid for their estates, though they have not 
yet received their grants, and nearly 500 more have made 
application.  Two villages have been formed; one of which is that 
where we rested, containing the church.  The other contains the 
warden's residence and office, the police-station, and a numerously 
attended school.

The squatters are of many races, and of many hues of black and 
brown.  The half-breeds from the neighbouring coast of Venezuela, a 
mixture, probably, of Spanish, Negro, and Indian, are among the most 
industrious; and their cacao plantations, in some cases, hold 8000 
to 10,000 trees.  The south-west corner of Montserrat {204} is 
almost entirely settled by Africans of various tribes--Mandingos, 
Foulahs, Homas, Yarribas, Ashantees, and Congos.  The last occupy 
the lowest position in the social scale.  They lead, for the most 
part, a semi-barbarous life, dwelling in miserable huts, and 
subsisting on the produce of an acre or two of badly cultivated 
land, eked out with the pay of an occasional day's labour on some 
neighbouring estate.  The social position of some of the Yarribas 
forms a marked contrast to that of the Congos.  They inhabit houses 
of cedar, or other substantial materials.  Their gardens are, for 
the most part, well stocked and kept.  They raise crops of yam, 
cassava, Indian corn, etc.; and some of them subscribe to a fund on 
which they may draw in case of illness or misfortune.  They are, 
however (as is to be expected from superior intellect while still 
uncivilised), more difficult to manage than the Congos, and highly 
impatient of control.

These Africans, Mr. Mitchell says, all belong nominally to some 
denomination of Christianity; but their lives are more influenced by 
their belief in Obeah.  While the precepts of religion are little 
regarded, they stand in mortal dread of those who practise this 
mischievous imposture.  Well might the Commissioner say, in 1867, 
that several years must elapse before the chaos which reigned could 
be reduced to order.  The wonder is, that in three years so much has 
been done.  It was very difficult, at first, even to find the 
whereabouts of many of the squatters.  The Commissioner had to work 
by compass through the pathless forest.  Getting little or no food 
but cassava cakes and 'guango' of maize, and now and then a little 
coffee and salt fish, without time to hunt the game which passed 
him, and continually wet through, he stumbled in suddenly on one 
squatting after another, to the astonishment of its owner, who could 
not conceive how he had been found out, and had never before seen a 
white man alone in the forest.  Sometimes he was in considerable 
danger of a rough reception from people who could not at first 
understand what they had to gain by getting legal titles, and buying 
the lands the fruit of which they had enjoyed either for nothing, or 
for payment of a small annual assessment for the cultivated portion.  
In another quarter--Toco--a notoriously lawless squatter had 
expressed his intention of shooting the Government official.  The 
white gentleman walked straight up to the little forest fortress 
hidden in bush, and confronted the Negro, who had gun in hand.

'I could have shot you if I had liked, buccra.'

'No, you could not.  I should have cut you down first:  so don't 
play the fool,' answered the official quietly, hand on cutlass.

The wild man gave in; paid his rates; received the Crown title for 
his land; and became (as have all these sons of the forest) fast 
friends with one whom they have learnt at once to love and fear.

But among the Montserrat hills, the Governor had struck on a spot so 
fit for a new settlement, that he determined to found one forthwith.  
The quick-eyed Jesuits had founded a mission on the same spot many 
years before.  But all had lapsed again into forest.  A group of 
enormous Palmistes stands on a plateau, flat, and yet lofty and 
healthy.  The soil is exceeding fertile.  There are wells and brooks 
of pure water all around.  The land slopes down for hundreds of feet 
in wooded gorges, full of cedar and other admirable timber, with 
Palmistes towering over them everywhere.  Far away lies the lowland; 
and every breeze of heaven sweeps over the crests of the hills.  So 
one peculiarly tall palm was chosen for a central landmark, an 
ornament to the town square such as no capital in Europe can boast.  
Traces were cut, streets laid out, lots of Crown lands put up for 
sale, and settlers invited in the name of the Government.

Scarcely eighteen months had passed since then, and already there 
Mitchell Street, Violin Street, Duboulay Street, Farfan Street, had 
each its new houses built of cedar and thatched with palm.  Two 
Chinese shops had Celestials with pigtails and thick-soled shoes 
grinning behind cedar counters, among stores of Bryant's safety 
matches, Huntley and Palmers' biscuits, and Allsopp's pale ale.  A 
church had been built, the shell at least, and partly floored, with 
a very simple, but not tasteless, altar; the Abbe had a good house, 
with a gallery, jalousies, and white china handles to the doors.  
The mighty palm in the centre of Gordon Square had a neat railing 
round it, as befitted the Palladium of the village.  Behind the 
houses, among the stumps of huge trees, maize and cassava, pigeon-
peas and sweet potatoes, fattened in the sun, on ground which till 
then had been shrouded by vegetation a hundred feet thick; and as we 
sat at the head man's house, with French and English prints upon the 
walls, and drank beer from a Chinese shop, and looked out upon the 
loyal, thriving little settlement, I envied the two young men who 
could say, 'At least, we have not lived in vain; for we have made 
this out of the primeval forest.'  Then on again.  'We mounted' (I 
quote now from the notes of one to whom the existence of the 
settlement was due) 'to the crest of the hills, and had a noble view 
southwards, looking over the rich mass of dark wood, flecked here 
and there with a scarlet stain of Bois Immortelle, to the great sea 
of bright green sugar cultivation in the Naparimas, studded by white 
works and villages, and backed far off by a hazy line of forest, out 
of which rose the peaks of the Moruga Mountains.  More to the west 
lay San Fernando hill, the calm gulf, and the coast toward La Brea 
and Cedros melting into mist.  M--- thought we should get a better 
view of the northern mountains by riding up to old Nicano's house; 
so we went thither, under the cacao rich with yellow and purple 
pods.  The view was fine:  but the northern range, though visible, 
was rather too indistinct, and the mainland was not to be seen at 
all.'

Nevertheless, the panorama from the top of Montserrat is at once the 
most vast, and the most lovely, which I have ever seen.  And 
whosoever chooses to go and live there may buy any reasonable 
quantity of the richest soil at 1 pounds per acre.

Then down off the ridge, toward the northern lowland, lay a headlong