heard a second
time, and tardy justice done, not by popular clamour, but by fair
and deliberate law. His nephew set out to bring the good man home
in triumph. He found him dying in a wretched Portuguese inn.
Chacon heard that his honour was cleared at last, and so gave up the
ghost.

Thus ended--as Earth's best men have too often ended--the good Don
Alonzo Chacon. His only monument in the island is one, after all,
'aere perennius;' namely, that most beautiful flowering shrub which
bears his name; Warsewiczia, some call it; others, Calycophyllum:
but the botanists of the island continue loyally the name of
Chaconia to those blazing crimson spikes which every Christmas-tide
renew throughout the wild forests, of which he would have made a
civilised garden, the memory of the last and best of the Spanish
Governors.

So Trinidad became English; and Picton ruled it, for a while, with a
rod of iron.

I shall not be foolish enough to enter here into the merits or
demerits of the Picton case, which once made such a noise in
England. His enemies' side of the story will be found in M'Callum's
Travels in Trinidad; his friends' side in Robinson's Life of Picton,
two books, each of which will seem, I think, to him who will read
them alternately, rather less wise than the other. But those who
may choose to read the two books must remember that questions of
this sort have not two sides merely, but more; being not
superficies, but solids; and that the most important side is that on
which the question stands, namely, its bottom; which is just the
side which neither party liked to be turned up, because under it (at
least in the West Indies) all the beetles and cockroaches,
centipedes and scorpions, are nestled away out of sight: and there,
as long since decayed, they, or their exuviae and dead bodies, may
remain. The good people of Trinidad have long since agreed to let
bygones be bygones; and it speaks well for the common-sense and good
feeling of the islanders, as well as for the mildness and justice of
British rule, that in two generations such a community as that of
modern Trinidad should have formed itself out of materials so
discordant. That British rule has been a solid blessing to
Trinidad, all honest folk know well. Even in Picton's time, the
population increased, in six years, from 17,700 to 28,400; in 1851
it was 69,600; and it is now far larger.

But Trinidad has gained, by