At one point, I recollect, a gold-green Jacamar sat on a log and looked at me till I was within five yards of her.  At another we heard the screams of Parrots; at another, the double note of the Toucan; at another, the metallic clank of the Bell-bird, or what was said to be the Bell-bird.  But this note was not that solemn and sonorous toll of the Campanese of the mainland which is described by Waterton and others.  It resembled rather the less poetical sound of a woman beating a saucepan to make a swarm of bees settle.

At one point we met a gang of Negroes felling timber to widen the road.  Fresh fallen trees, tied together with lianes, lay everywhere.  What a harvest for the botanist was among them!  I longed to stay there a week to examine and collect.  But time pressed; and, indeed, collecting plants in the wet season is a difficult and disappointing work.  In an air saturated with moisture specimens turn black and mouldy, and drop to pieces; and unless turned over and exposed to every chance burst of sunshine, the labour of weeks is lost, if indeed meanwhile the ants, and other creeping things, have not eaten the whole into rags.

Among these Negroes was one who excited my astonishment; not merely for his size, though he was perhaps the tallest man whom I saw among the usually tall Negroes of Trinidad; but for his features, which were altogether European of the highest type; the forehead high and broad, the cheek-bones flat, the masque long and oval, and the nose aquiline and thin enough for any prince.  Conscious of his own beauty and strength, he stood up among the rest as an old Macedonian might have stood up among the Egyptians he had conquered.  We tried to find out his parentage.  My companions presumed he was an ‘African,’ i.e. imported during the times of slavery.  He said No:  that he was a Creole, island born; but his father, it appeared, had been in one of our Negro regiments, and had been settled afterwards on a Government grant of land.  Whether his beauty was the result of ’atavism’—­of the reappearance, under the black skin and woolly hair, of some old stain of white blood; or whether, which is more probable, he came of some higher African race; one could not look at him without hopeful surmises as to the possible rise of the Negro, and as to the way in which it will come about—­the only way in which any race has permanently risen, as far as I can ascertain; namely, by the appearance among them of sudden sports of nature; individuals of an altogether higher type; such a man as that terrible Daaga, whose story has been told.  If I am any judge of physiognomy, such a man as that, having—­what the Negro has not yet had—­’la carriere ouverte aux talents,’ might raise, not himself merely, but a whole tribe, to an altogether new level in culture and ability.