When I went to bed, I found the bedclothes saturated with dampness.  But I learned that it was like a Newport fog, too saline to be mischievous.  The atmosphere of the island, even in the brightest and most elastic weather, is so impregnated with moisture, that a Leyden jar will lose its charge in being taken across the room, and an electrical machine will not work without a pan of coals under the cylinder.  But as no part of the island is more than twenty-five miles from the sea, this continual moisture appears to be quite innocuous, its worst effect being the musty smell which it causes in everything in the mountains, where there is the most rain.  Use fortunately takes from us the perception of this, or it would be quite intolerable.  Perpetual summer, and the utmost glory of earth, sky, and sea, are not to be enjoyed without drawbacks that would make a careful housekeeper very doubtful about the desirableness of the exchange.  And so ended my first day in the country.

CHAPTER IV.

GEOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE ISLAND

I had intended writing some of my first impressions about Jamaica, particularly its negro population.  But I find, on reviewing my residence of five years and a half in the tranquil island, that first impressions melt so imperceptibly into final conclusions, that it appears best not to attempt a too formal separation of them.  Before recounting the results of my own experience, however, in any form, it will not be amiss to attempt some general description of the island and of its population, and to give a slight sketch of its history.

The parallel of 18 deg.  N lat. passes through the island of Jamaica, which has thus a true tropical climate.  It is 160 miles in length and 40 in average breadth, having thus a plane area of 6,400 square miles, being about equal to the united area of Connecticut and Rhode Island.  Although the third in size of the Greater Antilles, it comes at a great remove after Hayti, the second, being not more than one-fourth as large.  Nor does it compare in fertility with either Hayti or Cuba.  The former island is the centre of geological upheaval, and the great rounded masses, sustaining a soil of inexhaustible depth, run off from thence splintering into sharp ridges, which in Jamaica become veritable knife edges, sustaining a soil comparatively thin.  The character of the island is that of a mountain mass, which, as the ancient watermark on the northern coast shows, has at some remote period been tilted over, and has shot out an immense amount of detritus on its southern side, forming thus the plains which extend along a good part of that coast, varying in breadth from ten to twenty miles, besides the alluvial peninsula of Vere.  In the interior, also, there is an upland basin of considerable extent, looking like the dry bed of a former lake, which now forms the chief part of the parish of St. Thomas-in-the-Vale.  The mountain