on
the shore, we began somewhat to regret that European manners and
customs prevented our adopting the Guaraon and Arrawak fashion.

[Illustration: THE MULE-CART.]

The mule-cart arrived; the lady of the party was put into it on a
chair, and slowly bumped and rattled past the corner of Dundonald
Street--so named after the old sea-hero, who was, in his life-time,
full of projects for utilizing this same pitch--and up in pitch road,
with a pitch gutter on each side.

The pitch in the road has been, most of it, laid down by hand, and is
slowly working down the slight incline, leaving pools and ruts full of
water, often invisible, because covered with a film of brown
pitch-dust, and so letting in the unwary walker over his shoes. The
pitch in the gutter-bank is in its native place, and as it spues
slowly out of the soil into the ditch in odd wreaths and lumps, we
could watch, in little, the process which has produced the whole
deposit--probably the whole lake itself.

A bullock-cart, laden with pitch, came jolting down past us, and we
observed that the lumps, when the fracture is fresh, have all a drawn
out look; that the very air bubbles in them, which are often very
numerous, are all drawn out likewise, long and oval, like the
air-bubbles in some ductile lavas.

On our left, as we went on, the bush was low, all of yellow cassia and
white Hibiscus, and tangled with lovely convolvulus-like creepers,
Ipomoea and Echites, with white, purple or yellow flowers. On the
right were negro huts and gardens, fewer and fewer as we went on,--all
rich with fruit trees, especially with oranges, hung with fruit of
every hue; and beneath them, of course, the pine-apples of La Brea.
Everywhere along the road grew, seemingly wild here, that pretty low
tree, Cashew, with rounded yellow-veined leaves and little green
flowers, followed by a quaint pink and red-striped pear, from which
hangs, at the larger and lower end, a kidney-shaped bean, which bold
folk eat when roasted; but woe to those who try it when raw; for the
acrid oil blisters the lips, and even while the beans are roasting the
fumes of the oil will blister the cook's face if she holds it too near
the fire.

As we went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and
thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more
and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy,
till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen. An Ipomoea