At length we turned aside into a byroad leading up a steep hill, slippery with mud, and left this pleasant valley.  I passed through it many a time afterwards, and never lost the impression of its peaceful richness.

We now found ourselves in the wild country in which our missionary stations lie.  Hills rose around on every side; their surfaces broken and furrowed into every fantastic variety of shape, with only distance enough between their bases for the mountain streams to flow.  In our latitude such a country would be much of the time a bleak desolation.  But here the mantle of glorious and everlasting green softens and enriches the broken and fluctuating surfaces into luxuriant and cloying beauty.  In such an ocean of verdure we now found ourselves, its emerald waves rolling above, below, and around us.  Our road, when once we had surmounted the short hill, was a narrow, winding bridle path, which kept along almost upon a level over a continual succession of natural causeways, spanning the gullies with such an appearance of art as I have never seen elsewhere.  I afterward learned that these are dikes of trap, from which the softer rock has been gradually disintegrated, leaving them thus happily arranged for human convenience.

After three miles’ travel over these roads of nature’s making, in a rain which at last became quite uncomfortable, we came finally to Oberlin Mission House.  A West Indian country house, without fire or carpets, must be very pleasingly fitted up not to look dreary in a wet day, and Oberlin House appeared rather cheerless as we alighted with streaming garments, the romance pretty well soaked out of us for the time.  But after supper and a change of clothes, and the clearing away of the clouds, our dismal spirits cleared up too, and we went out into the garden to enjoy the rare flowers and plants—­the crimson-leaved ponsetto, the Bleeding Heart, with its ensanguined centre, the curiously pied and twisted Croton Pictum, the Plumbago, well named from the leaden hue of its flowers, the long, deep-red leaves of the Dragon’s Blood, the purple magnificence of the Passion flower, relieved by the more familiar beauty of the Four o’clock and of the Martinique rose.  Seeing something that pleased me, I stepped forward to view it more narrowly, when a sudden access of acute pain in one foot, quickly spreading to the knee, admonished me that I had got into mischief in the shape of an ant’s nest, and gave me the first instalment of a lesson I learned in due time very thoroughly, that the beauties of Jamaica are to be enjoyed with a very cautious regard to the paramount rights of the insect creation.