most as blue as the sky against which they were faintly
visible. Miss Roy, the lady and mistress of the establishment, came out
to meet me: middle-aged, with a touch of the black blood, but with a
face in which one places instant and sure dependence, shrewd, quiet,
sensible, and entirely good-humoured. A white-haired brother, somewhat
infirm and older than she, glided behind her as her shadow. She attends
to the business. His pride is in his garden, where he has gathered a
collection of rare plants in admired disorder; the night-blowing cereus
hanging carelessly over a broken paling, and a palm, unique of its kind,
waving behind it. At the back were orange trees and plantains and coffee
bushes, with long-tailed humming birds flitting about their nests among
the branches. All kinds of delicacies, from fruit and preserves to
coffee, Miss Roy grows for her visitors on her own soil, and prepares
from the first stage to the last with her own cunning hands.

Having made acquaintance with the mistress, I strolled out to look about
me. After walking up the road for a quarter of a mile, I found myself in
an exact reproduction of a Warwickshire hamlet before the days of
railways and brick chimneys. There were no elms to be sure--there were
silk cotton-trees and mangoes where the elms should have been; but there
were the boys playing cricket, and a market house, and a modest inn, and
a shop or two, and a blacksmith's forge with a shed where horses were
standing waiting their turn to be shod. Across the green was the parish
church, with its three aisles and low square tower, in which hung an old
peal of bells. Parish stocks I did not observe, though, perhaps, I might
have had I looked for them; but there was a schoolhouse and parsonage,
and, withdrawn at a distance as of superior dignity, what had once
perhaps been the squire's mansion, when squire and such-like had been
the natural growth of the country. It was as if a branch of the old tree
had been carried over and planted there ages ago, and as if it had taken
root and become an exact resemblance of the parent stock. The people
had black faces; but even they, too, had shaped their manners on the
old English models. The men touched their hats respectfully (as they
eminently did not in Kingston and its environs). The women smiled and
curtsied, and the children looked shy when one spoke to them. The name
of slavery is a horror to us; but there must have been something human
and kin