h handsome Harry Darcantel, went
alongside the "Rosalie," and Commodore Cleveland turned into his
friend's cot opposite, leaving small Mr. Mouse to sleep his dream out
till morning; while, as the barge ran up to the landing at Kingston
Harbor, and a gold ounce was slipped into the old coxswain's honest paw,
what did they all think about? Good-night!

CHAPTER XXXIX.

ESCONDIDO.

"They bore her far to a mountain green,
To see what mortal never had seen;
And they seated her high on a purple sward,
And bade her heed what she saw and heard;
And note the changes the spirits wrought,
For now she lived in the land of thought."

"'Twixt Africa and Ind, I'll find him out,
And force him to restore his purchase back,
Or drag by the curls to a foul death,
Cursed as his life."

Hidden in a cleft of the hills of Jamaica, fifteen hundred feet above
that blue tropical sea below, on the brow of a cool valley, where that
bounding stream of white water rushes from the tall peak in the sky in
tiny cataracts, till it forms a pool there, held in by the smooth rim of
rocks, where the cane-mill is lazily turning its overshot wheel, with
the spray flying off in streaming mist, and the happy blacks stacking
the sugar-cane in even fagots as they unlade the huge carts with solid
wheels cut out of a single drum of a cotton-tree; the six or eight yoke
of oxen ahead ruminating under the shade of the tropical foliage, with
never a switch to their tails; while the lively young sea-breeze comes
flurrying up the valley, whistling among the coffee bushes below,
bending the standing cane on the slopes, rattling the tamarinds,
cocoa-nuts, and plantains, and then climbing with noisy wings up the
mountain, is lost with a whirl in the heavy cloud which obscures the
lofty peak.

Below the mill, where the mule-path crosses the foaming torrent by the
shaky bridge, which stands on cocoa-nut stilts, and never yet has been
thrown down by an earthquake, nestling under a precipitous crag, stood
the mountain seat of Escondido. Vines and parasitical plants, mingled
with scarlet creeping geraniums, made a living wall of dewy green and
red on the face of the hoary rock, falling over here and there at some
projecting acclivity in leafy torrents, and then forming a glowing green
cornice along the topmost edges of the height.

The buildings stood on a flat esplanade below, looking down the gorge as
from the apex of a