itself a building may be in Trinidad, it is certain,
at least after a few years, to look beautiful, because embowered
among noble flowering timber trees, like those that fill 'Brunswick
Square,' and surround the great church on its south side.

Under cool porticoes and through tall doorways are seen dark
'stores,' filled with all manner of good things from Britain or from
the United States. These older-fashioned houses, built, I presume,
on the Spanish model, are not without a certain stateliness, from
the depth and breadth of their chiaroscuro. Their doors and windows
reach almost to the ceiling, and ought to be plain proofs, in the
eyes of certain discoverers of the 'giant cities of Bashan,' that
the old Spanish and French colonists were nine or ten feet high
apiece. On the doorsteps sit Negresses in gaudy print dresses, with
stiff turbans (which are, according to this year's fashion, of
chocolate and yellow silk plaid, painted with thick yellow paint,
and cost in all some four dollars), all aiding in the general work
of doing nothing: save where here and there a hugely fat Negress,
possibly with her 'head tied across' in a white turban (sign of
mourning), sells, or tries to sell, abominable sweetmeats, strange
fruits, and junks of sugar-cane, to be gnawed by the dawdlers in
mid-street, while they carry on their heads everything and anything,
from half a barrow-load of yams to a saucer or a beer-bottle. We
never, however, saw, as Tom Cringle did, a Negro carrying a burden
on his chin.

I fear that a stranger would feel a shock--and that not a slight
one--at the first sight of the average negro women of Port of Spain,
especially the younger. Their masculine figures, their ungainly
gestures, their loud and sudden laughter, even when walking alone,
and their general coarseness, shocks, and must shock. It must be
remembered that this is a seaport town; and one in which the licence
usual in such places on both sides of the Atlantic is aggravated by
the superabundant animal vigour and the perfect independence of the
younger women. It is a painful subject. I shall touch it in these
pages as seldom and as lightly as I can. There is, I verily
believe, a large class of Negresses in Port of Spain and in the
country, both Catholic and Protestant, who try their best to be
respectable, after their standard: but unfortunately, here, as
elsewhere over the world, the scum rises naturall