stick there, a nail somewhere else, a lock or a clamp in a fourth place, about the sugar-estates, regardless of the serious injury which he caused to working buildings; and when he had gathered a sufficient pile, hidden safely away behind his neighbour’s house, the new hut rose as if by magic.  This continual pilfering, I was assured, was a serious tax on the cultivation of the estates around.  But I was told, too, frankly enough, by the very gentleman who complained, that this habit was simply an heirloom from the bad days of slavery, when the pilfering of the slaves from other estates was connived at by their own masters, on the ground that if A’s Negroes robbed B, B’s Negroes robbed C, and so all round the alphabet; one more evil instance of the demoralising effect of a state of things which, wrong in itself, was sure to be the parent of a hundred other wrongs.

Being, happily for me, in the Governor’s suite, I had opportunities of seeing the interior of the island which an average traveller could not have; and I looked forward with interest to visiting new settlements in the forests of the interior, which very few inhabitants of the island, and certainly no strangers, had as yet seen.  Our journey began by landing on a good new jetty, and being transferred at once to the tramway which adjoined it.  A truck, with chairs on it, as usual here, carried us off at a good mule-trot; and we ran in the fast-fading light through a rolling hummocky country, very like the lowlands of Aberdeenshire, or the neighbourhood of Waterloo, save that, as night came on, the fireflies flickered everywhere among the canes, and here and there the palms and Ceibas stood up, black and gaunt, against the sky.  At last we escaped from our truck, and found horses waiting, on which we floundered, through mud and moonlight, to a certain hospitable house, and found a hungry party, who had been long waiting for a dinner worth the waiting.

It was not till next morning that I found into what a charming place I had entered overnight.  Around were books, pictures, china, vases of flowers, works of art, and all appliances of European taste, even luxury; but in a house utterly un-European.  The living rooms, all on the first floor, opened into each other by doorless doorways, and the walls were of cedar and other valuable woods, which good taste had left still unpapered.  Windowless bay windows, like great port-holes, opened from each of them into a gallery which ran round the house, sheltered by broad sloping eaves.  The deep shade of the eaves contrasted brilliantly with the bright light outside; and contrasted too with the wooden pillars which held up the roof, and which seemed on their southern sides white-hot in the blazing sunshine.