ownward like strings. The strongest
among them would lay hold of two or three others and climb up upon them,
the rest would die and drop off, while the successful one, having found
support for itself above, would remain swinging in the air and thicken
and prosper. The leap he explained by the wind. I retained a suspicion
that the wind had been assisted by some aspiring energy in the plant
itself, so bold it was and so ambitious.

But the wonders of the garden were thrown into the shade by the cottage
at the extreme angle of it, where Kingsley[A] had been the guest of
Sir Arthur Gordon. It is a long straggling wooden building with deep
verandas lying in a hollow overshadowed by trees, with views opening out
into the savanna through arches formed by clumps of tall bamboos, the
canes growing thick in circular masses and shooting up a hundred feet
into the air, where they meet and form frames for the landscape,
peculiar and even picturesque when there are not too many of them. These
bamboos were Kingsley's special delight, as he had never seen the like
of them elsewhere. The room in which he wrote is still shown, and the
gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is
cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which
still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing
evening of his own life.

[Footnote A: Charles Kingsley, who wrote here his "At Last," descriptive
of tropical scenes.]

[Happiness makes its home with the negroes of Trinidad, whom
nature keeps in pristine idleness. They have little to do other
than to pull and eat.]

In Trinidad there are eighteen thousand freeholders, most of them
negroes and representatives of the old slaves. Their cabins are spread
along the road on either side, overhung with bread-fruit-trees,
tamarinds, calabash-trees, out of which they make their cups and
water-jugs; the luscious granadilla climbs among the branches; plantains
throw their cool shade over the doors; oranges and limes and citrons
perfume the air, and droop their boughs under the weight of their golden
burdens. There were yams in the gardens and cows in the paddocks, and
cocoa-bushes loaded with purple or yellow pods. Children played about in
swarms in happy idleness and abundance, with schools, too, at intervals,
and an occasional Catholic chapel, for the old religion prevails in
Trinidad, never having been disturbed.

What form could human