e; and the
establishment can then be removed elsewhere, to reclaim a fresh
sheet of land.

Altogether, the place was a satisfactory specimen of what can be
effected in a tropical country by a Government which will govern.
Since then, another source of profitable employment for West Indian
convicts has been suggested to me. Bamboo, it is now found, will
supply an admirable material for paper; and I have been assured by
paper-makers that those who will plant the West Indian wet lands
with bamboo for their use, may realise enormous profits.

We scrambled back into the boat--had, of course, a heap of fruit,
bananas, oranges, pine-apples, tossed in after us--and ran back
again in the steamer to the famous La Brea.

As we neared the shore, we perceived that the beach was black as
pitch; and the breeze being off the land, the asphalt smell (not
unpleasant) came off to welcome us. We rowed in, and saw in front
of a little row of wooden houses a tall mulatto, in blue policeman's
dress, gesticulating and shouting to us. He was the ward-policeman,
and I found him (as I did all the coloured police) able and
courteous, shrewd and trusty. These police are excellent specimens
of what can be made of the Negro, or half-Negro, if he be but first
drilled, and then given a responsibility which calls out his self-
respect. He was warning our crew not to run aground on one or other
of the pitch reefs, which here take the place of rocks. A large
one, a hundred yards off on the left, has been almost all dug away,
and carried to New York or to Paris to make asphalt pavement. The
boat was run ashore, under his directions, on a spit of sand between
the pitch; and when she ceased bumping up and down in the muddy
surf, we scrambled out into a world exactly the hue of its
inhabitants--of every shade, from jet-black to copper-brown. The
pebbles on the shore were pitch. A tide-pool close by was enclosed
in pitch: a four-eyes was swimming about in it, staring up at us;
and when we hunted him, tried to escape, not by diving, but by
jumping on shore on the pitch, and scrambling off between our legs.
While the policeman, after profoundest courtesies, was gone to get a
mule cart to take us up to the lake, and planks to bridge its water-
channels, we took a look round at this oddest of corners of the
earth.

In front of us was the unit of civilisation--the police-station,
wooden, on wooden stilts (as all we