road spurs like a ceiba. You
look up and see that they are Bois immortelles, fifty or sixty feet
high, one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood
under a Lombardy poplar in early spring and looked up at its buds and
twigs showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt the
beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly--but only faintly--the beauty
of these "madres de cacao,"--cacao mothers, as they call them
here,--because their shade is supposed to shelter the cacao-trees, while
the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp.

I turned my dazzled eyes down again and looked into the delicious
darkness under the bushes. The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or
green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced
through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem,
and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem, and there, again, on a
bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I
saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted
with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a
small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the
cacao-pods, full of what are called at home cacao-nibs. And there lay a
heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them sat their
brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a
cloth. I went up and told him that I came from England, and never saw
cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at
which news he grinned amusement till his white teeth and eyeballs made a
light in that dark place, and offered me a fresh broken pod, that I
might taste the pink sour sweet pulp in which the rows of the nibs lie
packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing.

He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and
careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed
on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating
the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on
mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps
in Paris to the chocolate-makers, who convert them into chocolate,
"Menier" or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla--both,
possibly, from this very island. This latter fact once inspired an
adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in
Trinidad just