Why not? I kill no other man's
wife,' was said by as pretty, gentle, graceful a lad of two-and-
twenty as one need see; a convict performing, and perfectly, the
office of housemaid in a friend's house. There is murder of wives,
or quasi-wives now and then, among the baser sort of Coolies--murder
because a poor girl will not give her ill-earned gains to the
ruffian who considers her as his property. But there is also law in
Trinidad, and such offences do not go unpunished.

Then on through Savanna Grande and village again, and past more
sugar estates, and past beautiful bits of forest, left, like English
woods, standing in the cultivated fields. One batch of a few acres
on the side of a dell was very lovely. Huge Figuiers and Huras were
mingled with palms and rich undergrowth, and lighted up here and
there with purple creepers.

So we went on, and on, and into the thick forest, and what was, till
Sir Ralph Woodford taught the islanders what an European road was
like, one of the pattern royal roads of the island. Originally an
Indian trace, it had been widened by the Spaniards, and transformed
from a line of mud six feet broad to one of thirty. The only
pleasant reminiscence which I have about it was the finding in
flower a beautiful parasite, undescribed by Griesbach; {192} a 'wild
pine' with a branching spike of crimson flowers, purple tipped,
which shone in the darkness of the bush like a great bunch of
rosebuds growing among lily-leaves.

The present Governor, like Sir Ralph Woodford before him, has been
fully aware of the old saying--which the Romans knew well, and which
the English did not know, and only rediscovered some century since--
that the 'first step in civilisation is to make roads; the second,
to make more roads; and the third, to make more roads still.'

Through this very district (aided by men whose talents he had the
talent to discover and employ) he has run wide, level, and sound
roads, either already completed or in progress, through all parts of
the island which I visited, save the precipitous glens of the
northern shore.

Of such roads we saw more than one in the next few days. That day
we had to commit ourselves, when we turned off the royal road, to
one of the old Spanish-Indian jungle tracks. And here is a recipe
for making one:--Take a railway embankment of average steepness,
strew it freely with wreck, rigging and all, to imitate the fallen
timb