The road leads on past the Custom-house; and past, I am sorry to say, evil smells, which are too common still in Port of Spain, though fresh water is laid on from the mountains.  I have no wish to complain, especially on first landing, of these kind and hospitable citizens.  But as long as Port of Spain—­the suburbs especially—­ smells as it does after sundown every evening, so long will an occasional outbreak of cholera or yellow fever hint that there are laws of cleanliness and decency which are both able and ready to avenge themselves.  You cross the pretty ‘Marine Square,’ with its fountain and flowering trees, and beyond them on the right the Roman Catholic Cathedral, a stately building, with Palmistes standing as tall sentries round; soon you go up a straight street, with a glimpse of a large English church, which must have been still more handsome than now before its tall steeple was shaken down by an earthquake.  The then authorities, I have been told, applied to the Colonial Office for money to rebuild it:  but the request was refused; on the ground, it may be presumed, that whatever ills Downing Street might have inflicted on the West Indies, it had not, as yet, gone so far as to play the part of Poseidon Ennosigaeus.

Next comes a glimpse, too, of large—­even too large—­Government buildings, brick-built, pretentious, without beauty of form.  But, however ugly in itself a building may be in Trinidad, it is certain, at least after a few years, to look beautiful, because embowered among noble flowering timber trees, like those that fill ’Brunswick Square,’ and surround the great church on its south side.

Under cool porticoes and through tall doorways are seen dark ‘stores,’ filled with all manner of good things from Britain or from the United States.  These older-fashioned houses, built, I presume, on the Spanish model, are not without a certain stateliness, from the depth and breadth of their chiaroscuro.  Their doors and windows reach almost to the ceiling, and ought to be plain proofs, in the eyes of certain discoverers of the ‘giant cities of Bashan,’ that the old Spanish and French colonists were nine or ten feet high apiece.  On the doorsteps sit Negresses in gaudy print dresses, with stiff turbans (which are, according to this year’s fashion, of chocolate and yellow silk plaid, painted with thick yellow paint, and cost in all some four dollars), all aiding in the general work of doing nothing:  save where here and there a hugely fat Negress, possibly with her ‘head tied across’ in a white turban (sign of mourning), sells, or tries to sell, abominable sweetmeats, strange fruits, and junks of sugar-cane, to be gnawed by the dawdlers in mid-street, while they carry on their heads everything and anything, from half a barrow-load of yams to a saucer or a beer-bottle.  We never, however, saw, as Tom Cringle did, a Negro carrying a burden on his chin.