omen at work in the stream
had been disturbed a few days before our visit by one of these monsters,
who had come down to see what they were about. They are harmless, but
trying to the nerves.

[We shall conclude this selection with a leap from Trinidad to
Jamaica, and the relation of an adventure experienced by our
author in that island. He was on his way back from an excursion
into the island.]

The train from Porus brought us back to Kingston an hour before sunset.
The evening was lovely, even for Jamaica. The sea-breeze had fallen, the
land-breeze had not risen, and the dust lay harmless on road and hedge.
Cherry Garden, to which I was bound, was but seven miles distant by the
direct road, so I calculated on a delightful drive which would bring me
to my destination before dark.

So I calculated; but alas! for human expectation. I engaged a "buggy" at
the station, with a decent-looking conductor, who assured me that he
knew the way to Cherry Garden as well as to his own door. His horse
looked starved and miserable. He insisted that there was not another in
Kingston that was more than a match for it. We set out, and for the
first two or three miles we went on well enough, conversing amicably on
things in general. But it so happened that it was market day. The road
was thronged with women plodding along with their baskets on their
heads, a single male on a donkey to each detachment of them, carrying
nothing, like an officer with a detachment of soldiers.

Foolish indignation rose in me, and I asked my friend if he was not
ashamed of seeing the poor creatures toiling so cruelly, while their
lords and masters amused themselves. I appealed to his feelings as a
man, as if it were likely that he had got any. The wretch only laughed.
"Ah, massa," he said, with his tongue in his cheek, "women do women's
work, men do men's work,--all right." "And what is men's work?" I asked.
Instead of answering he went on, "Look at they women, massa,--how they
laugh, how happy they be! Nobody more happy than black woman, massa."

I would not let him off. I pricked into him, till he got excited too,
and we argued and contradicted each other, till at last the horse,
finding he was not attended to, went his own way, and that was a wrong
one. Between Kingston and our destination there is a deep sandy flat,
overgrown with brush and penetrated in all directions with labyrinthine
lanes. Into this we had wandered in our quarr