erminus, an inland
town with the singular name of Porus. No explanation is given of it in
the local handbooks; but I find a Porus among the companions of
Columbus, and it is probably an interesting relic of the first Spanish
occupation. The railway had brought business. Mule carts were going
about, and waggons; omnibuses stood in the yards, and there were stores
of various kinds. But it was all black. There was not a white face to be
seen after we left the station. One of my companions in the train was a
Cuban engineer, now employed upon the line; a refugee, I conjectured,
belonging to the beaten party in the late rebellion, from the bitterness
with which he spoke of the Spanish administration.

Porus is many hundred feet above the sea, in a hollow where three
valleys meet. Mandeville, to which I was bound, was ten miles farther
on, the road ascending all the way. A carriage was waiting for me, but
too small for my luggage. A black boy offered to carry up a heavy bag
for a shilling, a feat which he faithfully and expeditiously performed.
After climbing a steep hill, we came out upon a rich undulating plateau,
long cleared and cultivated; green fields with cows feeding on them;
pretty houses standing in gardens; a Wesleyan station; a Moravian
station, with chapels and parsonages. The red soil was mixed with
crumbling lumps of white coral, a ready-made and inexhaustible supply of
manure. Great silk-cotton trees towered up in lonely magnificence, the
home of the dreaded Jumbi--woe to the wretch who strikes an axe into
those sacred stems! Almonds, cedars, mangoes, gum trees spread their
shade over the road. Orange trees were everywhere; sometimes in
orchards, sometimes growing at their own wild will in hedges and copse
and thicket. Finally, at the outskirts of a perfectly English village,
we brought up at the door of the lodging house kept by the justly
celebrated Miss Roy. The house, or cottage, stood at the roadside, at
the top of a steep flight of steps; a rambling one-story building, from
which rooms, creeper-covered, had been thrown out as they were wanted.
There was the universal green verandah into which they all opened; and
the windows looked out on a large common, used of old, and perhaps now,
as a race-course; on wooded slopes, with sunny mansions dropped here and
there in openings among the woods; on farm buildings at intervals in
the distance, surrounded by clumps of palms; and beyond them ranges of
mountains al