nd ice by a hospitable manager, whose
rooms were hung with good prints, and stored with good books and
knick-knacks from Europe, showing the signs of a lady's hand. And
here our party broke up. The rest carried their mud back to Port of
Spain; I in the opposite direction back to San Fernando, down a
little creek which served as a port to the estate.

Plastered up to the middle like the rest of the party, besides
splashes over face and hat, I could get no dirtier than I was
already. I got without compunction into a canoe some three feet
wide; and was shoved by three Negroes down a long winding ditch of
mingled mud, water, and mangrove-roots. To keep one's self and
one's luggage from falling out during the journey was no easy
matter; at one moment, indeed, it threatened to become impossible.
For where the mangroves opened on the sea, the creek itself turned
sharply northward along shore, leaving (as usual) a bed of mud
between it and the sea some quarter of a mile broad; across which we
had to pass as a short cut to the boat, which lay far out. The
difficulty was, of course, to get the canoe out of the creek up the
steep mud-bank. To that end she was turned on her side, with me on
board. I could just manage, by jamming my luggage under my knees,
and myself against the two gunwales, to keep in, holding on chiefly
by my heels and the back of my neck. But it befell, that in the
very agony of the steepest slope, when the Negroes (who worked like
really good fellows) were nigh waist-deep in mud, my eye fell, for
the first time in my life, on a party of Calling Crabs, who had been
down to the water to fish, and were now scuttling up to their
burrows among the mangrove-roots; and at the sight of the pairs of
long-stalked eyes, standing upright like a pair of opera-glasses,
and the long single arms which each brandished, with frightful
menaces, as of infuriated Nelsons, I burst into such a fit of
laughter that I nearly fell out into the mud. The Negroes thought
for the instant that the 'buccra parson' had gone mad: but when I
pointed with my head (I dare not move a finger) to the crabs, off
they went in a true Negro guffaw, which, when once begun, goes on
and on, like thunder echoing round the mountains, and can no more
stop itself than a Blackcap's song. So all the way across the mud
the jolly fellows, working meanwhile like horses, laughed for the
mere pleasure of laughing; and w