cactus hedges, rising in columnar rows, and then came out upon the
excellent macadamized road over which thirteen of the sixteen miles of
our journey lay. As we went along we met a continual succession of
groups of the country people, mostly women and children, coming into
Kingston with their weekly load of provisions to sell. They eyed us with
expressions varying from good-natured cordiality to sullenness, and
occasionally we heard a rude remark at the expense of the 'Buckras;' but
for the most part their demeanor was civil and pleasant. Most of them
had the headloads without which a negro woman seems hardly complete in
the road, varying in dimensions from a huge basket of yams or bananas to
an ounce vial. How such a slight thing manages to keep its perpendicular
with their careless, swinging gait, is something marvellous, but they
manage it to perfection. Almost every group, in addition, had a
well-laden donkey--comical little creatures, looking hardly bigger under
their huge hampers than well-sized Newfoundland dogs, and hurrying
nimbly along, with a speed that betokened a wholesome remembrance of a
good many hard thrashings in the past and a reasonable dread of similar
ones in the future. If I held the doctrine of transmigration, I should
be firmly persuaded that the souls of parish beadles, drunken captains,
and other petty tyrants, shifted quarters into the bodies of Jamaica
negroes' donkeys. One patriotic black woman, whose donkey was rather
refractory, relieved her mind by exclaiming, in a tone of infinite
disgust, 'O-h-h you Roo-shan!' accompanying her objurgation by several
emphatic demonstrations on his hide of how she was disposed to treat a
'Rooshan' at that present moment.[8]

Going on, we passed several beautiful 'pens,' as farms devoted to
grazing are called. These near town are little more than mere pieces of
land surrounding elegant villas, the residence of wealthy gentlemen
whose business lies in Kingston. Here you see 'the one-storied house of
the tropics, with its green jalousies and deep veranda,' surrounded by
handsomely kept meadows of the succulent Guinea grass, which clothes so
large a part of the island with its golden green, and enclosed by wire
fences or by the intricate but delicate logwood hedges, or else by stone
walls. On either side of the carriage road which swept round before the
most elegant of these villas, that of Mr. Porteous, we noticed rows of
the mystic century plant.

At last