daytime, are most
common about noon; simply because then the streams of hot air rise
most frequently and rapidly, to struggle with the cooler layers
aloft. There is thunder, of course, in the West Indies, continuous
and terrible. But it occurs after midsummer, at the breaking up of
the dry season and coming on of the wet.

At last the truck stopped at a manager's house with a Palmiste,
{124} or cabbage-palm, on each side of the garden gate, a pair of
columns which any prince would have longed for as ornaments for his
lawn. It is the fashion here, and a good fashion it is, to leave
the Palmistes, a few at least, when the land is cleared; or to plant
them near the house, merely on account of their wonderful beauty.
One Palmiste was pointed out to me, in a field near the road, which
had been measured by its shadow at noon, and found to be one hundred
and fifty-three feet in height. For more than a hundred feet the
stem rose straight, smooth, and gray. Then three or four spathes of
flowers, four or five feet long each, jutted out and upward like;
while from below them, as usual, one dead leaf, twenty feet long or
more, dangled head downwards in the breeze. Above them rose, as
always, the green portion of the stem for some twenty feet; and then
the flat crown of feathers, as dark as yew, spread out against the
blue sky, looking small enough up there, though forty feet at least
in breadth. No wonder if the man who possessed such a glorious
object dared not destroy it, though he spared it for a different
reason from that for which the Negroes spare, whenever they can, the
gigantic Ceibas, or silk cotton trees. These latter are useless as
timber; and their roots are, of course, hurtful to the canes. But
the Negro is shy of felling the Ceiba. It is a magic tree, haunted
by spirits. There are 'too much jumbies in him,' the Negro says;
and of those who dare to cut him down some one will die, or come to
harm, within the year. In Jamaica, says my friend Mr. Gosse, 'they
believe that if a person throws a stone at the trunk, he will be
visited with sickness, or other misfortune. When they intend to cut
one down, they first pour rum at the root as a propitiatory
offering.' The Jamaica Negro, however, fells them for canoes, the
wood being soft, and easily hollowed. But here, as in Demerara, the
trees are left standing about in cane-pieces and pastures to decay
into awful and fantastic