st-marshal, small planters, and a few
junior officers of the army and navy.

He had turned away with cynicism from the overladen table, with its
shoulder of stewed wild boar in the centre; with its chocolate, coffee,
tea, spruce-beer, cassava-cakes, pigeon-pies, tongues, round of beef,
barbecued hog, fried conchs, black crab pepper-pod, mountain mullet,
and acid fruits. It was so unlike what his past had known, so "damnable
luxurious!" Now his eyes wandered over the space where were the
grandilla, with its blossom like a passion-flower, the black Tahiti
plum, with its bright pink tassel-blossom, and the fine mango trees,
loaded half with fruit and half with bud. In the distance were the
guinea cornfields of brownish hue, the cotton-fields, the long ranges
of negro houses like thatched cottages, the penguin hedges, with their
beautiful red, blue, and white convolvuluses; the lime, logwood,
and breadfruit trees, the avocado-pear, the feathery bamboo, and the
jack-fruit tree; and between the mountains and his own sugar-estates,
negro settlements and pens. He heard the flight of parrots chattering,
he watched the floating humming-bird, and at last he fixed his eyes upon
the cabbage tree down in the garden, and he had an instant desire for
it. It was a natural and human taste--the cabbage from the tree-top
boiled for a simple yet sumptuous meal.

He liked simplicity. He did not, as so many did in Jamaica, drink claret
or punch at breakfast soon after sunrise. In a land where all were
bon-vivants, where the lowest tradesmen drank wine after dinner, and
rum, brandy and water, or sangaree in the forenoon, a somewhat lightsome
view of table-virtues might have been expected of the young unmarried
planter. For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his
domain shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.

It was Dyck Calhoun.

With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.
Christmas Day was on his nerves. The whole town of Kingston, with its
twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church. If he entered
it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to
two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"--and peasants
in shag trousers, jackets of coarse blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with
one or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice
that number of ladies. It was not an island given over to piety, or to
religious habits.

Not that