with a clang, Jake's woolly head,
surmounted by the veriest wisp of a ragged red handkerchief, disappeared
behind the thick and impenetrable hedge of thorny cactus and spike-
guarded prickly-pear that inclosed the plantation, separating it from
the main-road forming its boundary and leading, some four miles or so
beyond, over mountain and gully to Saint George's, the capital town of
Grenada, the most southern of the group of the Windward Islands--a spot
where the earlier days of my rather adventurous life were passed and
which is endeared to me by all the vivid associations of youth, the fond
recollections of memory.

Our place was aptly named "Mount Pleasant," and well do I remember every
salient feature of it--the forest of lofty silk-cotton trees, bordered
on the left by a row of the curious _bois immortel_, with its blood-red
branches that had blossomed into flowers; the mountain slope covered
with green waving guinea-grass at the back; and in front the park-like
lawn already described. To the right was a long range of negro huts and
stabling; and, beyond these again the kitchen-garden or "provision
ground," prolific of sweet-potatoes, yams, and tanias, with plantain and
banana trees laden with pendent bunches of their sausage-shaped fruit
and hedged round with pine-apples. Stretching away still further in the
distance was the cocoa plantation, a sea of verdure, interspersed with
the darker green foliage of the nutmeg and wax-like clove-tree. Here
reigned in all its majesty the bread-fruit tree, with broad serrated
leaves, like a gigantic horse-chestnut, sheltering the more fragile
trees that grow only beneath its shadow, and acting as the "mother of
the cocoa"--el madre del cacao--as the Spaniards call it.

But, I wish to go back now to the memorable day when Jake set off so
briskly on his errand to see if the English mail steamer had arrived,
leaving me on the terrace in front of our house wondering, as he speeded
on his way, whether the packet was in sight; and, if she had been
signalled, trying to surmise what news she would bring.

I was really very anxious about the matter, and I will tell you the
reason why.

My father was an officer of the royal navy, who found it a hard thing,
with an increasing family, to make both ends meet in the mother country
on his half-pay. At last, sick of waiting for active employment afloat
during the long stagnation in the service occasioned by the interregnum
of peace th