as the flower is called, spreads over the cane-piece a purple haze, which flickers in long shining waves before the breeze.

One only fault it has; that from the luxuriance of its growth, no wind can pass through it, and that therefore the heat of a cane-field tract is utterly stifling.

Here and there we passed a still uncultivated spot; a desolate, reedy swamp, with pools and stunted alder-like trees, reminding us again of the Deep Fens, while the tall chimneys of the sugarworks, and the high woods beyond, completed the illusion.

Soon, however, we had a broad hint that we were not in the Fens, but in a tropic island. A window in heaven above was suddenly opened; out of it, without any warning, a bucket of warm water, happily clean, was emptied on each of our heads, and the next moment all was bright again. A thunder shower without a warning thunder-clap, was to me a new phenomenon, which was repeated several times that day.

The suddenness and the heaviness of the tropic shower are as amusing as the shower is trying. The umbrella or the water-proof must be always ready, or you will get wet through. And getting wet here, is a much more serious matter than in a temperate climate, where you may ride or walk all day in wet clothes and take no harm; for the rapid radiation produced by the intense sunshine causes a chill which may beget, only too easily, fever and ague not to be as easily shaken off.

The cause of these rapid and heavy showers is simple enough. The trade-wind, at this season of the year, is saturated with steam from the ocean

which it has crossed, and the least disturbance in its temperature, from ascending hot air or descending cold, precipitates the steam in a sudden splash of water out of a cloud, if there happens to be one near; if not, out of the clear air.

Therefore it is that these showers, when they occur in the daytime, are most common about noon; simply because then the streams of hot air rise most frequently and rapidly to struggle with the cooler layers aloft.

There is thunder, of course, in the West Indies, continuous and terrible. But it occurs after midsummer, at the breaking up of the dry season and coming on of the wet.

At last the truck stopped at a manager's house with a cabbage-palm, on each side of the gardengate,—a pair of columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments for his lawn. It is the fashion here, and a good fashion it is, to leave the palmistes, a few at least, when the land is cleared; or to plant them near the house, merely on account of their wonderful beauty.

One palmiste was pointed out to me in a field near the road which had been measured by its shadow at noon, and found to be one hundred and fifty-three feet in height. For more than a hundred feet the stem rose straight, smooth, and gray. Then three or four spathes of flowers, four or five feet long, jutted out in an upward direction, while from below them, as usual, one dead leaf, twenty feet long or more, dangled head downwards in the breeze.

Above them rose, as always, the green portion of the stem for some twenty feet; and then the flat crown of feathers, as dark as yew, spread out

against the blue sky, looking small enough up there, though forty feet at least in breadth.

And now we set ourselves to walk up to the depot where the government timber was being felled, and where the real "high woods" were to be seen at last. Our path lay along the half-finished tramway through the first cacao plantation I had ever seen, though I am happy to say by no means the last.

Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large, long leaves. Each tree is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the path, grew plants of the common hot-house datura, its long white flowers perfuming the air. They have been planted as landmarks to prevent the young cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs.

You look up and see that they are fifty or sixty feet high, throwing out one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood under a Lombardy poplar in early spring, and noticed its buds and twigs showing like pink coral upon a blue ground, and have felt the beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly-but only faintly-the beauty of these cacao-mothers, as they call them here, because their shade is supposed to shelter the cacao-trees, while the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp.

Spell and pronounce:

cacao, Lombardy, poplar, saturated, spathes, ague, cabbage-palm, jutted, yew, intense, layers, and precipitates.

LESSON LXXII.

WEST INDIAN SCENERY-Continued.

I turned my dazzled eyes down again, and looked into the delicious darkness under the bushes.

The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or green with ferns; and here and there, a slant ray of sunlight pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem, and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem - and there again, on a bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs, far away into the wood, were dotted with pods, crimson or yellow or green, of the size of a small closed hand.

These were the cacao pods, full of what are called at home cocoa-nibs. And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them, sat their brown owner picking them to pieces, and laying the seeds to dry on a cloth.

I went up and told him that I came from New York, and never saw cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at which news he laughed till his white teeth and eyeballs made a light in that dark place. He offered me a fresh broken pod that I might taste the pink, sour-sweet pulp in which the rows of nibs lie packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.

He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and if he be a well-to-do and careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating the better quality from the worse, and at last sends them down on mule-back to the

sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps disposed of in New York or Paris to the chocolate makers, who convert them into "Chocolat Menier," by mixing them with sugar and vanilla, both, possibly, from this very island.

This latter fact once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris, and (so goes the story) he succeeded. But the fair Creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the genuine article unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice, to and from that center of fashion, Paris.

So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat nothing but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times as much as home-made chocolate need cost.

Now we left the cacao grove, and I was aware, on each side of the tract, of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams; strange colossal shapes towering up, a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach; for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling.

Among them and over them, a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth which springs up at once whenever the primeval forest is cleared-all utterly impassable. These forms, of course, were all new to me, but I could not help remarking upon their tendency to grow enormous rounded leaves.

My first feeling on entering the high woods