Jamaica coffee is of an excellent quality; the berries, it is said, if kept two years, being equal to the best Mocha.  As some one laments that the cooks and grooms of the Romans spoke better Latin than even Milton among the moderns could write, so I can boast in behalf of the Jamaica negroes, that even Delmonico, unless he could secure the services of one of them who understands the true method of reducing the browned berry to an impalpable powder, by pulverizing it between a flat stone and a round one, must give up all hopes of presenting his guests with the ideal cup of coffee.  I would give the whole process by which an amber-colored stream, of perfect flavor, might be poured out, without a trace of sediment, to the very last drop, did I not reflect with pity that probably in all the wide extent of my country there is neither the apparatus of grinding nor the sable domestic with skill to use it.  Nay, even in Jamaica, where one would think they could afford to be slow for a good thing, since they are so amazingly slow to every good thing, I grieve to say that the barbarous mill, hacking and mangling the fragrant berry, has almost universally supplanted the more laborious ancient method by which it was gently reduced to its most perfect attrition, yielding up every particle of its aromatic strength.  Thus the modern demon of expedition, to whom quickness is so much more than quality, has invaded even the slumberous repose of our fair island, bringing under his arm, not a locomotive, but a coffee mill.  There are, to be sure, two or three locomotives on the twelve-mile railway between Kingston and Spanishtown, but it would be a cruel sarcasm to intimate that the genius of expedition ever brought them.

There are several other vegetable products of Jamaica, which it owes likewise to a happy accident.  The mango, for instance, which now grows in such profusion on uplands and plains, that if the groves should be cut down, the face of the country would seem naked, was a spoil of war, being brought from a French ship destined for Martinique, somewhere about 1790.  At first it is said the mangoes sold for a guinea a piece, with the express stipulation that the seed should be returned.  Now, in a good bearing season, I have actually seen a narrow mountain road fetlock deep with decaying mangoes, besides the thousands consumed by man and beast.  During the summer, in the good years, they furnish the main subsistence to the negro children, and a large part of the subsistence of the adults, and make a grateful and wholesome change from the yam and salt fish which constitute the staples of their diet the rest of the time.  It is this, probably, which has given rise to the absurd report that the negroes live principally on fruits spontaneously growing.