s brown with fallen leaves,
or green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight
pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a
gray stem, and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem--and there,
again, on a bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to
the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs, far away into
the wood, were dotted with pods, crimson or yellow or green, of the
size and shape of a small hand closed with the fingers straight out.
They were the Cacao-pods, full of what are called at home coco-nibs.
And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers;
and by them sat their brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying
the seeds to dry on a cloth. I went up and told him that I came
from England, and never saw Cacao before, though I had been eating
and drinking it all my life; at which news he grinned amusement till
his white teeth and eyeballs made a light in that dark place, and
offered me a fresh broken pod, that I might taste the pink sour-
sweet pulp in which the rows of nibs lie packed, a pulp which I
found very pleasant and refreshing.

He dries his Cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and
careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little
shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over,
separating the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them
down on mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad
cocoa, or perhaps sold in Paris to the chocolate makers, who convert
them into chocolate, Menier or other, by mixing them with sugar and
vanilla, both, possibly, from this very island. This latter fact
once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could
make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris. And (so goes
the story) he succeeded. But the fair Creoles would not buy it. It
could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had
crossed the Atlantic twice to and from that centre of fashion,
Paris. So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the
wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat
nought but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times
as much as home made chocolate need cost.

As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still
unfinished) one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant,
which bears in the island the ominous name o