VI.

THE GRAND SQUARE.

WE left Spanish Town by the early train for Old Harbour-the Esquivilla of the Spaniards-which we reached about nine o'clock. A more uncomfortable journey than these few miles of railway travelling it was never our lot to endure. We seemed to be in actual danger every minute. The train swung from side to side, jolted up and down, bumped its carriages together, careless alike of engineman or driver, acting apparently upon the dictates of its own irresponsible caprice. It would stop, perhaps, to utter piercing shrieks from its whistle-a cow was crossing the line-or, after a sudden explosion of pea-soup coloured smoke, a shower of live wood sparks would penetrate into the carriage, burning holes in our garments and occasionally alighting in our eyes. What with stopping for cows, and stopping to water, with slackening speed when the rails were broke, and with going at a snail's pace over some badly built embankment, it took us two hours to travel twelve miles-two hours of actual physical misery, unalleviated by even ordinarily comfortable carriages, and without the slightest protection from the glaring morning sun.

There was little in the scenery to divert our attention from the disagreeables of our journey. We passed through Bushy Park Estates, through high fields of sugar-canes-surely the most unbeautiful sight, except of course to a planter, which nature has to bestow.

We were struck with the profuse growth of the convolvuli on the low marsh lands between that place and Old Harbour. They trailed over the railway fence; they crept over the ground; they climbed up trees; they made unto themselves arbours of every broken branch and of every forked treelimb. There was nothing beautiful but much that was depressing in this wild, rank, lavish vegetation. One longed for a little English energy to cut away this life-destroying "bush," to clear the lines and open the landscape. Even our English fields,

"All tied up with hedges, nosegay-like,"

we felt were better than this unkempt, far from grand, luxuriance.

We stopped to breakfast at a little cottage tavern opposite the railway station. It was kept by an Englishman, who told us he had recently been so cruelly oppressed by the law, in passing through the insolvent court, that he could afford us but sorry accommodation. He had not hitherto been patronized, he said. His efforts at tavern-keeping, like everything else he had put his hand to, had been unsuccessful. He had been forty years in Jamaica, and had striven always to deal honestly with the Creoles,

-a dreadful mistake, he added bitterly, as he had found to his cost.

There was, certainly, a great absence of furniture about the establishment. But, en revanche, the hall boasted a marvellous work of art-a painting on canvas of the arms of Jamaica, the noble production of a black artist. There they stood as large as life, the two naked female savages, with leering eyes and feather petticoats, and gemmed and jewelled legs, arms, hands, and feet. One grasped bow and arrow; the other carried a pine-apple. Above their heads stood an alligator with tail erect, a characteristic grin on his jolly countenance, and an unmistakably human eye. At the foot of the picture was the motto, "Indus uterque serviet uni," in blue letters on a white ground; and below this in ornamental characters an inch in height was the inscription,

"W. Beckford.

Native Talent."

From Old Harbour we made a flying visit to the "Grand Square," as Vere with its rich quadrilateral of sugar estates is called by the planters.

The road was excellent all the way, but then it was early spring, and there were as yet no traces of "the seasons." The roads in Jamaica, it must be confessed, are but fine-weather roads. The sun is the best way-warden.

We slept at the Alley, a fair specimen of the ordinary and very uninteresting West Indian village. There was a court-house and a market-place, a lockup like a mosque in miniature, and a quaint brick

E

built church with a square tower and a slated roof, and a most orthodox-looking weathercock. The churchyard was overgrown with grass and weeds, like almost every other churchyard I ever saw in Jamaica. The Creoles have not yet learned to respect their dead. But it contained three magnificent ceibas, one of which at least, in its gigantic bulk, in the depth of its buttresses, and the enormous length of its branches, far surpassed the famous cotton-tree on the Spanish Town road. We essayed a rough measurement of this old forest giant, and found him to measure no less than eighty feet round the base. The height of the trunk before it split off into branches was between twenty-five and thirty feet. One of its limbs, decorated with half-a-dozen goitres like ants' nests, seemed to reach over half the churchyard, and in the deep embayments of its branches we found some combs of wild honey of pearly whiteness.

Thence turning our horses' heads northwards we arrived late in the evening at the pretty village of Chapelton, among the Clarendon hills.

How can we describe the unutterably bare and barren character of the scenery between the Alley and Four Paths, our half-way station on the road to Chapelton?

Dusty roads, bordered with stunted logwood-trees, for miles; then dusty roads without the logwoodtrees; then a dry river-course full of rough stones, which broke our buggy springs and delayed us an hour to have them tied up with ropes and branches; then

more dusty roads and logwood-trees, and then dusty roads without logwood-trees as before. Not a bird to be seen, not a butterfly on the wing; not a bit of colour, except a stray orchid or two, to break the drear monotony of the landscape.

I shall never forget the exuberant delight with which we caught sight of a brilliant bunch of Broughtonia sanguinea on a dusty logwood-tree in the course of our day's journey. Its rich magenta blossoms were a positive godsend to the eye, fatigued by perpetual sombre greys and washed-out greens. Besides, we had made a discovery in natural history. We had distinctly disproved Gosse's statement that the logwood was the only tree on which orchids did not grow.

"Dem bush no grow a' logwood tree!" said Bob. "Cho! de nigger people call dem trash" (and he pointed to our treasures), "noting but logwood bush!"

We rested at Four Paths till the sun had turned, then started in the cool of the evening for Chapelton. Here we had plenty to occupy and delight us. The air was filled as with a mist with the floating flakes of the "down" tree. Rare ferns grew on the banks; bright butterflies flitted across the path. If we had followed our inclination and taken out our butterfly nets, we should probably have been there till the following day. As it was, the fireflies had lighted their golden lamps, tree frogs were croaking, crickets and grasshoppers chirping, and the thousand and one voices of the night were in full melody by the time we reached our destination.