both are edible roots.  The white yams, boiled and mashed, are scarcely distinguishable from very superior white potatoes.  Above ground the plant is a vine, requiring to be trained on a pole, and a yamfield looks precisely like a vineyard.  But oh, the difference! while the vineyard calls up a thousand recollections of laughing girls treading the grape, and the sunny lands of story, a yamfield reminds you only that under the ground is a bulky esculent, which some months hence will be put into a negro pot, and boiled and eaten, with an utter absence of poetry, or of anything but appetite and salt.  It is plain that in this case solid usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy.  And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard.  So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African poets arise, will doubtless be duly canonized in song.

As yet the small freeholders have chiefly occupied themselves in raising these ‘ground provisions,’ as yams, plantains, bananas, and the various vegetables are called.  But they are more and more largely planting cane and coffee, greatly to their own advantage and that of the island.

If in this favored zone the earth is pleasant underneath, nothing can be more glorious than the heavens above.  Being under the parallel of 18 deg.  N. lat., of course we have a full view of all the northern heavens, and of all the southern heavens, except 18 deg. about the South Pole.  The rarefied atmosphere gives peculiar brilliancy to the stars; and on a clear night—­and most nights are clear—­the heavens are indeed flooded with white fire, while, according to the season of the year, Orion and his northern company appear with a lustre unwonted to us, or the Scorpion unfolds his sparkling length, or the Ship displays its glittering confusion of stars, or the Southern Cross rears aloft its sacred symbol.  Meanwhile, well down toward the northern horizon, the pole star holds its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly revolutions.  Long after sunset, and long before sunrise, night after night, the faint, nebulous gleam of the zodiacal lights stretches up toward the zenith.  The shortness of the twilight frequently leaves the fugacious planet, Mercury, so seldom seen at the north, in distinct view.  While Venus not merely casts a shadow in a clear night, as she does with us, but when she is brightest, actually shines through the clouds with an illumining power.