A passing traveller will see little to compensate the sadness occasioned by old magnificence thus in ruins, strewing the whole island with its melancholy wrecks.  What there is to set off against it, we shall consider hereafter.

What survives of the agriculture and commerce of Jamaica is still, as formerly, mainly dependent on the two great staples, sugar and coffee; the former being raised chiefly in the plains and valleys, the latter in the uplands and mountains.  There was, it is said, an indigenous sugar cane in the West Indies, when first discovered; but if so, it has long been supplanted by the Mauritius cane, which is now cultivated.  The joints of the cane, being cut and laid horizontally in furrows, which are then covered over, spring up in a crop which comes to maturity in about a year; and when this is cut, the roots rattoon, or send up shoots for five or six years in succession.  This is one reason why Jamaica sugar planters find it so hard to compete with Cuban production.  On the deep soil of Cuba the cane rattoons, it is said, not five or six, but forty years in succession.

The coffee plant is a beautiful shrub.  Left to itself, it would grow twenty or thirty feet high; but it is kept down to such a height as that the berries can easily be picked by the hand.  Its glossy, dark-green leaves resemble a good deal the jessamine; and the resemblance is increased during the time of flowering, by the beautiful white blossoms, of a faint, delicate fragrance, which are scattered over the branches like a light powdering of snow.  It thrives well in a moist air; and coffee plantations may be seen clothing the sides of mountains three, four, and even five thousand feet above the sea.  The history of the way in which coffee was introduced to the West Indies is really quite a little romance, though an authentic one.  It is well known that Holland used to practise the most odious commercial monopoly ever known among Christian nations.  Her spice islands were guarded with a cruel jealousy rivalling the fables of the dragon that guarded the golden apples; and her great coffee island, Java, was equally locked up from the world.  To give a spice plant or a coffee plant to a stranger, was an offence inexorably punished with death.  A single coffee plant, however, was allowed to come to Europe as an ornament to the conservatory of a wealthy Amsterdam burgomaster.  This was still more jealously watched than its fellows in the East Indies; but at length a French visitor managed to secrete a living berry, and, taking it with him to Paris, to raise a plant.  From this again a young plant was taken to Martinique, one of the French West Indies.  When the young stranger, freighted with such possibilities of wealth, arrived there, it was found that the exposure of the voyage had nearly extinguished its vitality.  It was tended with the most anxious care; but for two or three years it continued to languish, and threatened by an untimely death to give Dutch selfishness a triumph after all.  At last, however, it took a happy start, and from that plant the whole West Indies have derived their coffee.  It was introduced into Jamaica in 1720, and Temple Hall, one of the two estates which I have mentioned as being in the beautiful valley between Kingston and the American Mission, has the honor of showing the oldest coffee walk in the island.