Meanwhile my quarters were unexceptionable, my kind entertainers leaving nothing undone to make my stay with them agreeable. In hot climates one sleeps lightly; but light sleep is all that one wants, and one wakes early. The swimming bath was waiting for me underneath my window. After a plunge in the clear cold water came coffee, grown and dried and roasted on the spot, and ‘made’ as such coffee ought to be. Then came the early walk. One missed the tropical luxuriance of Trinidad and Dominica, for the winter months in Jamaica are almost rainless; but it would have been beautiful anywhere else, and the mango trees were in their glory. There was a corner given to orchids, which were hung in baskets and just coming into flower. Lizards swarmed in the sunshine, running up the tree trunks, or basking on the garden seats. Snakes there are none ; the mongoose has cleared them all away so completely that there is nothing left for him to eat but the poultry, in which he makes havoc, and, having been introduced to exterminate the vermin, has become a vermin himself.

ON THE BRITISH CAMP AT NEWCASTLE

To drive, to ride, to visit was the employment of the days. I saw the country. I saw what people were doing, and heard what they had to say.  The details are mostly only worth forgetting. The senior aide-de-camp, Captain C-, an officer in the Engineers, was a man of ability and observation. He, too, like the Colonel, was more interested in his profession, to which he was anxious to return, than in the waning fortunes of the West Indies. He superintended, however, the social part of the governor's business to perfection. Anything which I wished for had only to be mentioned to be provided. He gave me the benefit too, though less often than I could have wished, of his shrewd, and not ungenial, observations. He drove me one morning into Kingston. I had passed through it hastily on the day of my landing. There were libraries, museums, public offices, and such like to be seen, besides the town itself. High up on the mountain side, more often in the clouds than out of them, the cantonments of the English regiments were visible from the park at Government House. The slope where they had been placed was so steep that one wondered how they held on. They looked like tablecloths stretched out to dry. I was to ride up there one day. Meanwhile, as we were driving through the park and saw the white spots shining up above us, I asked the aide-de-camp what the privates found to do in such a place. The ground was too steep for athletics; no cricket could be possible there, no lawn tennis, no quoits, no anything. There were no neighbours. Sports there were none. The mongoose had destroyed the winged game, and there was neither hare nor rabbit, pig nor deer; not a wild animal to be hunted and killed. With nothing to do, no one to speak to, and nothing to kill, what could become of them? Did they drink? Well, yes. They drank rum occasionally; but there were no public-houses. They could only get it at the canteen, and the daily allowance was moderate. As to beer, it was out of reach altogether. At the foot of the mountains it, was double the price which it was in England. At Newcastle the price was doubled again by the cost of carriage to the camp. I inquired if they did not occasionally hang themselves. ‘Perhaps they would,’ he said, ‘if they had no choice,’ but they preferred to desert, and this they did in large numbers. They slipped down the back of the range, made their way to the sea, and escaped to the United States. The officers --- what became of them? The officers! Oh, well! they gardened ! Did they like it? Some did and some didn't. They were not so ill off as the men, as occasionally they could come down on leave. One wondered what the process had been -which had led the authorities to select such a situation. Of course it was for the health of the troops, but the hill country in Jamaica is wide ; there were many other places available, less utterly detestable, and ennui and discontent are as mischievous as fever. General -- -, a short time ago, went up to hold an inquiry into the desertions, and expressed his wonder how such things could be. With such air, such scenery, such views far and wide over the island, what could human creatures wish for more? ‘'You would desert yourself, general,’ said another officer, ‘if you were obliged to stay there a month.’

ON KINGSTON AND COMMERCE

Captain C--- undertook that I should go up myself in a day or two. He promised to write and make arrangements. Meanwhile we went on to Kingston. It was not beautiful. There was Rodney's statue. Rodney is venerated in Jamaica, as he ought to be; but for him it would have been a Spanish colony again. But there is nothing grand about the buildings, nothing even handsome, nothing even specially characteristic of England or the English mind. They were once perhaps businesslike, and business having slackened they are now dingy. Shops, houses, wharves, want brightness and colour. We called at the office of the Colonial Secretary, the central point of the administration. It was an old mansion, plain, unambitious, sufficient perhaps for its purpose, but lifeless and dark. If it represented economy there would be no objection. The public debt has doubled since it became a Crown colony. In 1876 it was half a million. It is now more than a million and a half. The explanation is the extension of the railway system, and there has been no culpable extravagance. I do not suppose that the reestablishment of a constitution would mend matters. Democracies are always extravagant. The majority, who have little property or none, regulate the expenditure. They lay the taxes on the minority, who have to find the money, and have no interest in sparing them.

Ireland when it was governed by the landowners, Jamaica in the days of slavery, were administered at a cost which seems now incredibly small. The authority of the landowners and of the planters was undisputed. They were feared and obeyed, and magistrates unpaid and local constables sufficed to maintain tolerable order. Their authority is gone. Their functions are transferred to the police, and every service has to be paid for. There may be fewer serious crimes, but the subordination is immeasurably less, the expense of administration is immeasurably greater. I declined to be taken over sugar mills, or to be shown the latest improvements. I was too ignorant to understand in what the improvements consisted, and could take them upon trust. The public bakery was more interesting. In tropical climates a hot oven in a small house makes an inconvenient addition to the temperature. The bread for Kingston, and for many miles around it, is manufactured at night by a single company and is distributed in carts in the morning. We saw the museum and public library. There were the usual specimens of island antiquities -of local fish, birds, insects, reptiles, plants, geological formations, and such like. In the library were old editions of curious books at the West Indies, some of them unique, ready to yield ampler pictures of the romance of the old life there than we at present possess. I had but leisure to glance at title pages and engraving. The most noticeable relic preserved there, if it be only genuine, is the identical bauble which Cromwell ordered to be taken away from the Speaker's table in the House of Commons. Explanations are given of the manner in which it came to Jamaica. The evidence, so far as I could understand it, did not appear conclusive.

Among the new industries in the island in the place of sugar was, or ought to be, tobacco. A few years ago I asked Sir W. Hooker, the chief living authority in such matters, why Cuba was allowed the monopoly of delicate cigar tobacco — whether there were no other countries where it could be grown equally good. He said that at the very moment cigars, as fine as the finest Havanas, were being produced in Jamaica. He gave me an excellent specimen with the address of the house which supplied it; and for a year or two I was able to buy from it what, if not perfect, was more than tolerable. The house acquired a reputation ; and then for some reason or other, perhaps from weariness of the same flavour, perhaps from a falling off in the character of the cigars, I and possibly others, began to be less satisfied. Here on the spot I wished to make another experiment. Captain C-- - introduced me to a famous manufacturer, a Spaniard, with a Spanish manager under him who had been trained at Havana. I bespoke his good will by adjuring him in his own tongue not to disappoint me; and I believe that he gave me the best that he had. But, alas! it is with tobacco as with most other things. Democracy is king; and the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the rule of modern life. The average of everything is higher than it used to be; the high quality which rises above mediocrity is rare or is non-existent. We are swept away by the genius of the age, and must be content with such other blessings as it has been pleased to bring with it.

1 Euripides

A VISIT TO GORDON TOWN WITH REFLECTIONS ON CHARACTER

Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath Newcastle. Colonel J--- had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river, which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed, were round as cannon balls, and weighing hundreds of tons, show what its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory: ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags and hanging out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we drove along, stood out the great limestone blocks which thunder down when loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks, who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines stand out sharper against the sky.

Introduced among scenery of this kind, we llowed the river two or three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge, above which stood my friend Miss Burton's lodging house, where she had designed entertaining me. At Gordon's Town, which is again a mile farther on, the valley widens out, and there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an opening we saw far above our holds, like specks of snow against the mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops.

Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and three hundred feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa on a projecting spur where a tributary of the Hope river has carved out a second ravine. We drove to the door up a steep winding lane among coffee bushes, which scented the air with their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on which the fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now eleven hundred feet above the sea. The air was already many degrees cooler than at Kingston. The ground in front of the house was leveled for a garden. Ivy was growing about the trellis work, and scarlet geraniums and sweet violets and roses, which cannot be cultivated in the lower regions, were here in full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there was a lawn tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in the clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From the balcony in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising behind peak, till the highest, four thousand feet above us, was lost in the white mist. Below was the valley of the Hope river with its gardens and trees and scattered huts, with buildings here and there of higher pretensions. On the other side the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while the breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters swayed up to us in intermittent pulsations.

The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation prosperity. What would become of it all if Jamaica drifted after her sisters in the Antilles, as some persons thought that she was drifting, and became, like Grenada, an island of small black proprietors? Was such a fate really hanging over her? Not necessarily, not by any law of nature. If it came, it would come from the dispiritment, the lack of energy and hope in the languid representatives of the English colonists ; for the land even in the mountains will grow what it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone ; and my friend Dr. Nicboll in Dominica had shown what English energy could do if it was alive and vigorous. The pale complaining beings of whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could not be of the same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave trade. The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men is it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the rest is not worth caring for. The black s do not deserve the ill that is spoken of them. The Colonel's house is twelve miles from Kingston. He told me that a woman would walk in with a load for him and return on the same day with another, for a shilling. With such material of labour wisely directed, whites and blacks might live and prosper together; but even the poor negro will not work when be is regarded only as a machine to bring grist to his master's mill.

A VISIT TO PORT ROYAL

A new fort was being built at the mouth of the harbour. New batteries were being armed on the sandbanks at Port RoyaL Colonel J--- had to inspect what was going on, and he allowed me to go with him. We were to lunch with the Commodore of the station at the Port Royal dockyard. I could then see the town or what was left of it, for the story went that half of it had been swallowed up by an earthquake. We ran out from Kingston, passing under the sterns of the Spanish frigates. I was told that there were always one or more Spanish ships of war stationed there, but no one knew anything about them except generally that they were on the look-out for Cuban conspirators. There was no exchange of courtesies between their officers and ours, nor even official communication beyond what was formally necessary. I thought it strange, but it was no business of mine. My surprise, however, was admitted to be natural. As the launch drew little water, we had no occasion to follow the circuitous channel, but went straight over the shoals. We passed close by Gallows Point, where the Johnny crows used to pick the pirates' bones. In the mangrove swamp adjoining, it was said that there was an old Spanish cemetery; but the swamp was poisonous, and no one had ever seen it. At the dockyard pier the Commodore was waiting for us. I found that he was an old acquaintance whom I had met ten years before at the Cape. He was a brisk, smart officer, quiet and sailorlike in his manners, but with plenty of talent and cultivation. He showed us his stores and his machinery, large engines, and engineers to work them, ready for any work which might be wanted, but apparently with none to do. We went over the hospital, airy and clean, with scarcely a single occupant, so healthy has now been made a spot which was once a nest of yellow fever. Naval stores soon become antiquated ; and parts of the great square were paved with the old cannon balls which had become useless on the introduction of rifled guns. The fortifications were antiquated also, but new works were being thrown up armed with the modern monster cannon. One difficulty struck me ; Port Royal stood upon a sand bank. In such a place no spring of freshwater could be looked for. On the large acreage of roofs there were no shoots to catch the rain and carry it into cisterns. Whence did the water come for the people in the town? How were tbe fleet supplied which used to ride there? How was it in the old times when Port Royal was crowded with revelling crews of buccaneers? I found that every drop which is consumed in the place, or which is taken on board either of merchant ship or man-of-war, is brought in a steam tug from a spring eight miles off upon the coast. Before steam came in, it was fetched in barges rowed by hand. Nothing could be easier than to save the rain which falls in abundance. Nothing could be easier than to lay pipes along the sand-spit to the spring. But the tug plies daily to and fro, and no one thinks more about the matter.

A West Indian regiment is stationed at Port Royal. After the dockyard we went through the soldiers' quarters and then walked through the streets of the once famous station. It is now a mere hamlet of boatmen and fishermen, squalid and wretched, without and within. Half-naked children stared at us from the doors with their dark, round eyes. I found it hard to call up the scenes of riot, and confusion, and wild excitement which are alleged to have been witnessed there. The story that it once covered a far larger area has been, perhaps, invented to account for the incongruity. Old plans exist which seem to show that the end of the spit could never have been of any larger dimensions than it is at present. There is proof enough, however, that in the sand there lie the remains of many thousand English soldiers and seamen, who ended their lives there for one cause or other. The bodies lie so close that they are turned up as in a country churchyard when a fresh grave is dug. The walls of the old church are inlaid thickly with monuments and monumental tablets to the memory of officers of either service, young and old; some killed by fever, some by accidents of war or sea; some decorated with the honours which they had won in a hundred fights, some carried off before they had gathered the first flower of fame. The costliness of many of these memorials was an affecting indication how precious to their families those now resting there once had been. One in high relief struck me as a characteristic specimen of Rubillac's workmanship. It was to a young lieutenant who had been killed by the bursting of a gun. Flame, and vapour were rushing out of the breech. The youth himself was falling backwards, with his arms spread out, and a vast preternatural face -- death, judgement, eternity, or whatever it was meant to be was glaring at him through the smoke. Bad art, though the execution was remarkable; but better, perhaps, than the weeping angels now grown common among ourselves.

After luncheon the Commodore showed us his curiosities, especially his garden, which, considering the state of his water supply, he had created under unfavourable conditions. He had a very respectable collection of tropical ferns and flowers, with palms and plantains to shade and shelter them He was an artist besides, within the lines of his own profession. Drawings of ships and boats of all sorts and in all attitudes by his own brush or pencil were hanging on the walls of his working room. He was good enough to ask me to spend a day or two with him at Port Royal before I left the island, and I looked forward with special pleasure to becoming closer acquainted with such a genuine piece of fine grained British oak.

A VISIT TO THE REMAINS OF FORT AUGUSTA

There were the usual ceremonies to be attended to. The officers of the guardsbip and gunboats had to be called on. The forts constructed, or in the course of construction, were duly inspected. I believe that there is a real serious intention to strengthen Port Royal in view of the changes which may come about through the opening, if that event ever takes place, of the Darien canal.

Our last visit was to a fort deserted, or all but deserted -- the once too celebrated Fort Augusta, which deserves particular description. It stands on the inner side of the lagoon commanding the deep-water channel at the point of the great mangrove swamp at the mouth of the Cobre river. For the purpose for which it was intended no better situation could have been chosen, had there been nothing else to be considered except the defence of the harbour, for a vessel trying to reach Kingston had to pass close in front of its hundred guns. It was constructed on a scale becoming its importance, with accommodation for two or three regiments, and the regiments were sent thither, and they perished, regiment after regiment, officers and men, from the malarious exhalations of the morass. Whole battalions were swept away. The ranks were filled up by reinforcements from home, and these, too, went the same road. Of one regiment the only survivors, according to the traditions of the place, were a quartermaster and a corporal. Finally it occurred to the authorities at the Horse Guards that a regiment of Hussars would be a useful addition to the garrison. It was not easy to see what Hussars -were to do there. There is not a spot where the horses could stand twenty yards beyond the lines; nor could they reach Fort Augusta at all except in barges. However, it was perhaps well that they were sent. Horses and men went the way of the rest. The loss of the men might have been supplied, but horses were costly, and the loss of them was more serious. Fort Augusta was gradually abandoned, and is now used only as a powder ma-azine. A guard is kept there of twenty blacks from the West Indian force, but even these are changed every ten days -- so deadly the vapour of that malarious jungle is now understood to be. I never saw so spectral a scene as met my eyes when we steamed up to the landing place -- ramparts broken down, and dismantled cannon lying at the foot of the wall overgrown by jungle. The sentinel who presented arms was like a corpse in uniform. He was not pale, for he was a negro -- he was green, and he looked like some ghoul or afrite in a ghastly cemetery. The roofs of the barracks and storehouses had fallen in, the rafters being left standing with the light shining between them as through the bones of skeletons. Great piles of shot lay rusting, as not worth removal; among them conical shot, so recently had this fatal charnel house been regarded as a fit location for British artillerymen

.I breathed more freely as we turned our backs upon the hideous memorial of parliamentary administration, and steamed away into a purer air. My conservative instincts had undergone a shock. As we look back into the past, the brighter features stand out conspicuously. The mistakes and miseries have sunk in the shade and are forgotten. In the present faults and merits are visible alike. The faults attract chief notice that they may be mended ; and as there seem so many of them, the impulse is to conclude that the past was better. It is well to be sometimes reminded what the past really was. In Colonel J --- I found a strong advocate of the late army reforms. Thanks to recovering energy and more distinct conscientiousness, thanks to the all seeing eye of the Press, such an experiment as that of Fort Augusta could hardly be tried again, or if tried could not be persisted in. Extravagance and absurdities, however, remain, and I was next to witness an instance of them.

A VISIT TO NEWCASTLE

Having ceased to quarter our regiments in mangrove swamps, we now build a camp for them among the clouds. I mentioned that Captain C --- had undertaken that I should see Newcastle. He had written to a friend there to say that I was coming up, and the junior aide-de-camp kindly lent his services as a guide. As far as Gordon's Town we drove along the same road which we had followed before. There, at a small wayside inn, we found horses waiting which were accustomed to the mountain. Suspicious mists were hanging about aloft, but the landlord, after a glance at them, promised us a fine clay, and we mounted and set off. My animal's merits were not in his appearance, but be had been up and down a hundred times, and might be trusted to accomplish his hundred and first without misfortune. For the first mile or so the road was tolerably level, following the bank of the river under the shade of the forest. It then narrowed into a horse path and zigzagged upwards at the side of a torrent into the deep pools of which we occasionally looked down over the edges of uncomfortable precipices. Then again there was a level, with a village and coffee plantations and oranges and bananas. After this the vegetation changed. We issued out upon open mountain, with English grass, English clover, English gorse, and other familiar acquaintances introduced to make the isolation less intolerable. The track was so rough and narrow that we could ride only in single file, and was often no better than a watercourse ; yet by this and no other way every article had to be carried on donkeys' backs or human heads which was required for the consumption of 300 infantry and 100 artillerymen. Artillerymen might seem to imply artillery, but they have only a single small field gun. They are there for health's sake only, and to be fit for work if wanted below. An hour's ride brought us to the lowest range of houses, which were 4,000 feet above the sea. From thence they rose, tier above tier, for 500 feet more. The weather so far had held up, and the views had been glorious, but we passed now into cloud, through which we saw, dimly, groups of figures listlessly lounging. The hillside was bare, and the slope so steep that there was no standing on it, save where it had been flattened by the spade ; and here in this extraordinary place were 400 young Englishmen of the common type of which soldiers are made, with nothing to do and nothing to enjoy -- remaining, unless they desert or die of ennui, for one, two, or three years, as their chance may be. Every other day they can see nothing, save each other's forms and faces in the fog; for, fine and bright as the air may be below, the moisture in the air is condensed into cloud by the chill rock and soil of the high ranges. The officers come down now and then on furlough or on duty; the men rarely and hardly at all, and soldiers, in spite of General ----, cannot always be made happy by the picturesque. They axe not educated enough to find employment for their minds, and of amusement there is none.

We continued our way up, the track if anything growing steeper, till we reached the highest point of the camp, and found ourselves before a pretty cottage with creepers climbing about it belonging to the major in command. A few yards off was the officers' mess room. They expected us. They knew my companion, and visitors from the underworld were naturally welcome. The major was an active clever man, with a bright laughing Irish wife, whose relations in the old country were friends of my own. The American consul and his lady happened to have ridden up also the same day; so, in spite of fog, which grew thicker every moment, we had a good time. As to seeing, we could see nothing; but then there was nothing to see except views; and panoramic views from mountain tops, extolled as they may be, do not particularly interest me. The officers, so far as I could learn, are less ill off than the privates. Those who are married have their wives with them; they can read, they can draw, they can ride; they have gardens about their houses where they can grow English flowers and vegetables and try experiments. Science can. be followed anywhere, and is everywhere a resource. Major -- - told me that he had never known what it was to find the day too long. Healthy the camp is at any rate. The temperature never rises above 70' nor sinks often below 60'. They require charcoal fires to keep the damp out and blankets to sleep under ; and when they see the sun it is an agreeable change and something to talk about. There are no large incidents, but small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling, the stone had cut a water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes, with a black picaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in Exeter Hall.

We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the violence of these Jamaican downpouiings. False had proved our prophet down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N ---, who, during her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not weather to stand talking in ; the torrent washed us apart.

And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we passed out below the clouds into clear bright sunshine. Above us it was still black as ever; the vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle was the property of a certain Sir ---, a high official of a past generation, who wished to part with it, and found a convenient purchaser in the Government.

OPINION OF UPPER CLASSES ON ‘SELF-GOVERNMENT’ FOR JAMAICA

The hospitalities at Government House were well maintained under the J --- administration. The colonel was gracious, the lady beautiful and brilliant. There were lawn parties and evening parties, when all that was best in the island was collected; the old Jamaican aristocracy, army and navy officers, civilians, eminent lawyers, a few men among them of high intelligence. The tone was old-fashioned and courteous, with little, perhaps too little, of the go-a-headism of younger colonies, but not the less agreeable on that account. As to prospects, or the present condition of things in the island, there were wide differences of opinion. If there was unanimity about anything, it was about the consequences likely to arise from an extension of the principle of self-government. There, at all events, lay the right road to the wrong place. The blacks had nothing to complain of, and the wrong at present was on the other side. The taxation falls heavily on the articles consumed by the upper classes. The duty on tea, for instance, was a shilling a pound, and the duties on other luxuries in the same proportion. It did not touch the negroes at all. They were acquiring land, and some thought that there ought to be a land tax. They would probably object and resist, and trouble would come if it was proposed, for the blacks object to taxes; as long as there are white men to pay them, they will be satisfied to get the benefit of the expenditure. But let not their English friends suppose that when they have the island for their own they will tax themselves for police or schools, or for any other of those educational institutions from which the believers in progress anticipate such glorious results.

As to the planters, it seemed agreed that when an estate was unencumbered and the owner resided upon it and managed it himself, he could still keep afloat. It was agreed also that when the owner was an absentee the cost of management consumed all the profits, and thus the same impulse to sell which had gone so far in the Antilles was showing itself more and more in Jamaica also. Fine properties all about the island were in the market for any price which purchasers could be found to give. Too many even of the old English families were tired of the struggle, and were longing to be out of it at any cost.

OPINION ON THE CHURCHES OF JAMAICA

At one time we heard much of the colonial Church and the power which it was acquiring, and as it seems unlikely that the political authority of the white race will be allowed to reassert itself, it must be through their minds and through those other qualities which religion addresses that the black race will be influenced by the white, if it is ever to be influenced at all.

I had marked the respect with which the Catholic clergy were treated in Dominica, and even the Hayti Republic still maintains the French episcopate and priesthood. But I could not find that the Church of England in Jamaica either was at present or had ever been more than the Church of the English in Jamaica, respected as long as the English gentry were a dominant power there, but with no independent charm to work on imagination or on superstition. Labat says, as I noted above, that the English clergy in his time did not baptise the black babies, on the curious ground that Christians could not lawfully be held as slaves, and the slaves therefore were not to be made Christians. A Jesuit Father whom I met at Government House told me that even now the clergy refuse to baptise the illegitimate children, and as, according to the official returns, two thirds of the children that are born in Jamaica come into the world thus irregularly, they are not likely to become more popular than they used to be. Perhaps Father --- was doing what a good many other people do, making a general practice out of a few instances. Perhaps the blacks themselves who wish their children to be Christians carry them to the minister whom they prefer, and that minister may not be the Anglican clergyman. Of Catholics there are not many in Jamaica ; of the Moravians I heard on all sides the warmest praise. They, above all the religious bodies in the island, are admitted to have a practical power for good over the limited number of people which belong to them. But the Moravians are but a few. They do not rush to make converts in the highways and hedges, and my observations in Dominica almost led me to wish that, in the absence of other forms of spiritual authority, the Catholics may become more numerous than they are. The priests in Dominica were the only Europeans who, for their own sakes and on independent grounds, were looked up to with fear and respect.

THE ROLE OF RELIGION IN JAMAICA

The religion of the future! That is the problem of problems that rises before us at the close of this waning century. The future of the West Indies is a small matter. Yet that, too, like all else, depends on the spiritual beliefs which are to rise out of the present confusion. Men will act well and wisely, or ill and foolishly, according to the form and force of their conceptions of duty. Once before, under the Roman Empire, the conditions were not wholly dissimilar. The inherited creed had become unbelievable, and the scientific intellect was turning materialist. Christianity rose out of the chaos, confounding statesmen and philosophers, and became the controlling power among mankind for 1,800 years. But Christianity found a soil prepared for the seed. The masses of the inhabitants of the Roman world were not materialist. The masses of the people believed already in the supernatural and in penal retribution after death for their sins. Lucretius complains of the misery produced upon them by the terrors of the anticipated Tartarus. Serious and good men were rather turning away from atheism than welcoming it ; and if they doubted the divinity of the Olympian gods, it was not because they doubted whether gods existed at all, but because the immoralities attributed to them were unworthy of the exalted nature of the Divine Being. The phenomena are different now. Who is now made wretched by the fear of hell? The tendency of popular thought is against the supernatural in any shape. Far into space as the telescope can search, deep as analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces which govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity and connection of cause and effect -- no sign anywhere of a personal will which is influenced by prayer or moral motive. When a subject is still obscure we are confident that it admits of scientific explanation ; we no longer refer ‘ad Deum,’ whom we regard as a constitutional monarch taking no direct part at all. The new creed, however, not having crystallised as yet into a shape which can be openly professed, and as without any creed at all the flesh and the devil might become too powerful, we maintain the old names and forms, as we maintain the monarchy. We surround both with reverence and majesty, and the reverence, being confined to feeling, continues to exercise a vague but wholesome influence. We row in one way while we look another. In the presence of the marked decay of Protestantism as a positive creed, the Protestant powers of Europe may, perhaps, patch up some kind of reconciliation with the old spiritual organisation which was shattered in the sixteenth century, and has since shown no unwillingness to adapt itself to modern forms of thought. The Olympian gods survived for seven centuries after Aristophanes with the help of allegory and ‘economy.’ The Church of Rome may survive as long after Calvin and Luther. Carlyle mocked at the possibility when I ventured to say so to him. Yet Carlyle seemed to think that the mass was the only form of faith in Europe which had any sincerity remaining in it.

A religion at any rate, which will keep the West Indian blacks from falling back into devil worship is still to seek. Constitutions and belief in progress may satisfy Europe, but will not answer in Jamaica. In spite of the priests, child murder and cannibalism have reappeared in Hayti ; but without them things mght have been worse than they are, and the preservation of white authority and influence in any form at all may be better than none.

White authority and white influence may, however, still be preserved in a nobler and better way. Slavery was a survival from a social order which had passed away, and slavery could not be continued. It does not follow that ‘per se’ it was a crime. The negroes who were sold to the dealers in the African factories were most of them either slaves already to worse masters or were ‘servi,’ servants in the old meaning of the word, prisoners of war, or else criminals, ‘servati’ reserved from death. They would otherwise have been killed ; and since the slave trade has been abolished are again killed in the too celebrated 'customs.' It was a crime when the chiefs made war on each other for the sake of captives whom they could turn into money. In many instances, perhaps in most, it was innocent and even beneficent. Nature has made us unequal, and Acts of Parliament cannot make us equal. Some must lead and some must follow, and the question is only of degree and kind. For myself, I would rather be the slave of a Shakespeare or a Burghley than the slave of a majority in the House of Commons or the slave of my own folly. Slavery is gone, with all that belonged to it ; but it will be an ill day for mankind if no one is to be compelled any more to obey those who are wiser than himself, and each of us is to do only what is right in our own eyes. There may be authority, yet not slavery: a soldier is not a slave, a sailor is not a slave, a child is not a slave, a wife is not a slave ; yet they may not live by their own wills or emancipate themselves at their own pleasure from positions in which nature has placed them, or into which they have themselves voluntarily entered. The negroes of the West Indies are children, and not yet disobedient children. They have their dreams, but for the present they are dreams only. If you enforce self-government upon them when they are not asking for it, you may turn the dream into a reality, wilfully drive them back into the condition of their ancestors, from which the slave trade was the beginning of their emancipation.

If I have spoken without enthusiasm of the working of the Church of England among the negroes, I have not meant to be disrespectful. As I lay awake at daybreak on the Sunday morning after my arrival, I heard the sound of church bells, not Catholic bells as at Dominica, but good old English chimes. The Church is disestablished so far as law can disestablish it, but, as in Barbadoes, the royal arms still stand over the arches of the chancel. Introduced with the English conquest, it has been identified with the ruling order of English gentry, respectable, harmless, and useful, to those immediately connected with it.

The parochial system, as in Barbadoes also, was spread over the island. Each parish had its church, its parsonage and its school, its fonts where the white children were baptised -- in spite of my Jesuit, I shall hope not whites only; and its graveyard, where in time they were laid to rest. With their quiet Sunday services of the old type the country districts were exact reproductions of English country villages. The church whose bells I had heard was of the more fashionable suburban type, standing in a central situation halfway to Kingston. The service was at the old English hour of eleven. We drove to it in the orthodox fashion, with our prayer books and Sunday costumes, the Colonel in uniform. The gentry of the neighbourhood are antiquated in their habits, and to go to church on Sunday is still regarded as a simple duty. A dozen carriagaes stood under the shade at the doors. The congregatioin was upper middle-class English of the best sort, and was large, though almost wholly white. White tablets as at Port Royal covered the walls, with familiar English names upon them. But for the heat I could have imagined myself at home. There were no Aaro Bangs to be seen,or Paul Gelids, with the rough sense, the vigour, the energy, and roystering lightheartedness of our grandfathers. The faces of the men were serious and thoughtful, with the shadow resting on them of an uncertain future. They are good churchmen still, and walk on in the old paths, wherever those paths may lead. They are old-fashioned and slow to change, and are perhaps belated in an eddy of the great stream of progress ; but they were pleasant to see and pleasant to talk to. After service there were the usual of shakins of hands among friends outside ; arrangements were made for amusements and expeditions in which I was invited to join -- which were got up, perhaps, for my own entertainment. I was to be taken to the sights of the neighbourhood; I was to see this; I was to see that ; above all, I must see the Peak of the Blue Mountains. The peak itself I could see better from below, for there it stood, never moving, between seven and eight thousand feet high.. But I had had mountain riding enough, and was allowed to plead my age and infirmities. It was arranged finally that I should be driven the next day to Castleton, seventeen miles off over a mountain pass, to see the Botanical Gardens.

A VISIT TO CASTLETON GARDENS

Accordingly early on the following morning we set off; two carriages full of us ; Mr. M--, a new friend lately made, but I hope long to be preserved, on the box of his four-in-hand. The road was as good as all roads are in Jamaica and Barbadoes, and more cannot be said in their favour. Forest trees made a roof over our heads as we climbed to the crest of the ridge. Thence we descended the side of a long valley, a stream running below us which gradually grew into a river. We passed through all varieties of cultivation. On the high ground there was a large sugar plantation, worked by coolies, the first whom I had seen in Jamaica. In the alluvial meadows on the river-side were tobacco fields, cleanly and carefully kept, belonging to my Spanish friend in Kingston, and only too rich in leaves. There was sago too, and ginger, and tamarinds, ,and cocoa, and coffee, and cocoa-nut palms. On the hill-sides were the garden farms of the blacks, and were something to see and remember. They receive from the Government at an almost nominal quit rent an acre or two of uncleared forest. To this as the first step they set light ; at twenty different spots we saw their fires blazing. To clear an acre they waste the timber on half a dozen or a dozen. They plant their yams and sweet potatoes among the ashes and grow crops there till the soil is exhausted. Then they move on to another, which they treat with the same recklessness, leaving the first to go back to scrub. Since the Chinaman burnt his house to roast his pig, such waste was never seen. The male proprietors were lounging about smoking. Their wives, as it was market day, were tramping into Kingston with their baskets on their heads ; we met them literally in thousands, all merry and lighthearted, their little ones with little baskets trudging at their side. Of the lords of the creation we saw, perhaps, one to each hundred women, and he would be riding on mule or donkey, pipe in mouth and carrying nothing. He would be generally sulky too, while the ladies, young and old, had all a civil word for us and curtsied under their loads. Decidedly if there is to be a black constitution I would give the votes only to the women.

We reached Castleton at last. It was in a hot damp valley, said to be a nest of yellow fever. The gardens slightly disappointed me ; my expectations had been too much raised by Trinidad. There were lovely flowe rs of course, and curious plants and trees. Every known palm is growing there. They try hard to grow roses, and they say that they succeed. They were not in flower, and I could not judge. But the familiar names were all there, an others which were not familiar, the newest importations called after the great ladies of the day. I saw one labelled Mabel Morrison. To find the daughter of an ancient college friend and contemporary giving a name to a plant in the New World makes one feel dreadfully old; but I expected to find, and I did not find, some useful practical horticulture going on. They ought, for instance, to have been trying experiments with orange trees. The orange in Jamaica is left to nature. They plant the seeds, and leave the result to chance. They neither bud nor graft, and go upon the hypothesis that as the seed is, so will be the tree which comes of it. Yet even thus, so favourable is the soil and climate that the oranges of Jamaica are prized above all others which are sold in the American market. With skill and knowledge and good selection they might produce the finest in the world. 'There are dollars in that island, sir,'as an American gentleman said to me, ' if they will look for them in the right way.' Nothing of this kind was going on at Castleton ; so much the worse, but perhaps things will mend by-and-by. I was consoled partly by another specimen of the Amherstia nobilis. It was not so large as those which I had seen at Trinidad, but it was in splendid bloom, and certainly is the most gorgeous flowering tree which the world contains.

Wild nature also was luxuriantly beautiful. We picnicked by the river, which here is a full rushing stream with pools that would have held a salmon, and did hold abundant mullet. We found a bower formed by a twisted vine, so thick that neither sun nor rain could penetrate the roof. The floor was of shining shingle, and the air breathed cool from off the water. It was a spot which nymph or naiad may haunt hereafter, when nymphs are born again in the new era. The creatures of imagination have fled away from modern enlightenment. But we were a pleasant party of human beings, lying about under the shade upon the pebbles. We had brought a blanket of ice with us, and the champagne was manufactured into cup by choicest West Indian skill. Figures fall unconsciously at such moments into attitudes which ,would satisfy a painter, and the scenes remain upon the memory like some fine finished work of art. We had done with the gardens, and I remember no more of them except that I saw a mongoose stalking a flock of turkeys. The young ones and their mother gathered together and showed fight. The old cock, after the manner of the male animal, seemed chiefly anxious for his own skin. On the way back we met the returning stream of women and children, loaded heavily as before and with the same elastic step. In spite of all that is incorrect about them, the women are the material to work upon ; and if they saw that we were in earnest, they would lend their help to make their husbands bestir themselves. A Dutch gentleman once boasted to me of the wonderful prosperity of Java, where everybody was well off and everybody was industrious. He so insisted upon the industry that I asked him how it was brought about. Were the people slaves ? ' Oh,' he cried, as if shocked, ‘God forbid that a Christian nation should be so wicked as to keep slaves!’ ‘Do they never wish to be idle?’ I asked. 'Never, never,' he said ; 'no, no : we do not permit anyone to be idle.'