my host, who transferred me to his own carriage.
We had still four or five miles to go through cane fields and among
sugar mills. At the end of them we came to a grand avenue of cabbage
palms, a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet high. How their slim stems
with their dense coronet of leaves survive a hurricane is one of the
West Indian marvels. They escape destruction by the elasticity with
which they yield to it. The branches, which in a calm stand out
symmetrically, forming a circle of which the stem is the exact centre,
bend round before a violent wind, are pressed close together, and stream
out horizontally like a horse's tail.

The avenue led up to Sir Graham's house, which stands 800 feet above the
sea. The garden, once the wonder of the island, was running wild, though
rare trees and shrubs survived from its ancient splendour. Among them
were two Wellingtonias as tall as the palms, but bent out of shape by
the trade winds. Passing through a hall, among a litter of Carib
curiosities, we entered the drawing-room, a magnificent saloon extending
with various compartments over the greater part of the ground-floor
story. It was filled with rare and curious things, gathered in the days
when sugar was a horn of plenty, and selected with the finest taste;
pictures, engravings, gems, antiquarian relics, books, maps, and
manuscripts. There had been fine culture in the West Indies when all
these treasures were collected. The English settlers there, like the
English in Ireland, had the tastes of a grand race, and by-and-by we
shall miss both of them when they are overwhelmed, as they are likely to
be, in the revolutionary tide. Sir Graham was stemming it to the best of
his ability, and if he was to go under would go under like a gentleman.
A dining room almost as large had once been the scene of hospitalities
like those which are celebrated by Tom Cringle. A broad staircase led up
from the hall to long galleries, out of which bedrooms opened; with cool
deep balconies and the universal green blinds. It was a palace with
which Aladdin himself might have been satisfied, one of those which had
stirred the envying admiration of foreign travellers in the last
century, one of many then, now probably the last surviving
representative of Anglo-West Indian civilisation. Like other forms of
human life, it has had its day and could not last for ever. Something
better may grow in the place of it, but also something worse may grow.
The e