atter, with their
thick, brown rinds, look more like billets of wood, crusted with earth,
than anything else. People in this country are apt to imagine them to be
a huge kind of sweet potato, with which they have no other connection
than that both are edible roots. The white yams, boiled and mashed, are
scarcely distinguishable from very superior white potatoes. Above ground
the plant is a vine, requiring to be trained on a pole, and a yamfield
looks precisely like a vineyard. But oh, the difference! while the
vineyard calls up a thousand recollections of laughing girls treading
the grape, and the sunny lands of story, a yamfield reminds you only
that under the ground is a bulky esculent, which some months hence will
be put into a negro pot, and boiled and eaten, with an utter absence of
poetry, or of anything but appetite and salt. It is plain that in this
case solid usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather
loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a
fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard.
So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which,
when African poets arise, will doubtless be duly canonized in song.

As yet the small freeholders have chiefly occupied themselves in raising
these 'ground provisions,' as yams, plantains, bananas, and the various
vegetables are called. But they are more and more largely planting cane
and coffee, greatly to their own advantage and that of the island.

If in this favored zone the earth is pleasant underneath, nothing can be
more glorious than the heavens above. Being under the parallel of 18 deg. N.
lat., of course we have a full view of all the northern heavens, and of
all the southern heavens, except 18 deg. about the South Pole. The rarefied
atmosphere gives peculiar brilliancy to the stars; and on a clear
night--and most nights are clear--the heavens are indeed flooded with
white fire, while, according to the season of the year, Orion and his
northern company appear with a lustre unwonted to us, or the Scorpion
unfolds his sparkling length, or the Ship displays its glittering
confusion of stars, or the Southern Cross rears aloft its sacred symbol.
Meanwhile, well down toward the northern horizon, the pole star holds
its fixed position, and the Great and the Little Bear, dipping toward
the ocean wave, but not yet dipping in it, pursue their nightly
revolutions. Long after sunset, and long