ality--a vigorous, effective, perhaps ambitious gentleman, with a
clear eye to the views of his employers at home on whom his promotion
depends--certain to make himself agreeable to them, likely to leave his
mark to useful purpose on the colonies over which he presides or may
preside hereafter. Here in Trinidad he was learning Spanish in addition
to his other linguistic accomplishments, that he might show proper
courtesies to Spanish residents and to visitors from South America.

The 'Residence' stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own
at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built regardless of
expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On
the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me,
an enormous ceiba or silk cotton tree, umbrella shaped, fifty yards in
diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive
that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their
weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's
head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites.

Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the
West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the
negro, the temple of Jumbi the proper home of Obeah. To cut one down is
impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica
police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who
used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the
devil.

From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens.
I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond
description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English
conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of
others of which we cannot raise even Lilliputian imitations. Let man be
what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing
in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage
towering up into the sky to the fan palm of the desert whose fronds are
reservoirs of water. Of exogenous trees, the majority were leguminous in
some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging
their seed in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most
splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old World names with
characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, a