that one can well believe travellers when they tell us that the
Indian tribes wage war against each other for the possession of the
trees which bear these precious vagaries of bounteous nature.

And now we began to near the village, two scattered rows of clay and
timber bowers right and left of the trace, each half buried in
fruit-trees and vegetables, and fenced in with hedges of scarlet
Hibiscus; the wooded mountains shading them to the south, the sea
thundering behind them to the north. As we came up we heard a bell,
and soon were aware of a brown mob running, with somewhat mysterious
in the midst. Was it the Host? or a funeral? or a fight? Soon the
mob came up with profound salutations, and smiles of self-
satisfaction, evidently thinking that they had done a fine thing;
and disclosed, hanging on a long bamboo, their one church-bell.
Their old church (a clay and timber thing of their own handiwork)
had become ruinous; and they dared not leave their bell aloft in it.
But now they were going to build themselves a new and larger church,
Government giving them the site; and the bell, being on furlough,
was put into requisition to ring in His Excellency the Governor and
his muddy and quaintly attired--or unattired--suite.

Ah, that I could have given a detailed picture of the scene before
the police court-house--the coloured folk, of all hues of skin, all
types of feature, and all gay colours of dress, crowding round, the
tall stately brown policeman, Thompson, called forward and receiving
with a military salute the Governor's commendations for having
saved, at the risk of his life, some shipwrecked folk out of the
surf close by; and the flash of his eye when he heard that he was to
receive the Humane Society's medal from England, and to have his
name mentioned, probably to the Queen herself; the greetings, too,
of almost filial respect which were bestowed by the coloured people
on one who, though still young, had been to them a father; who,
indeed, had set the policeman the example of gallantry by saving, in
another cove near by, other shipwrecked folk out of a still worse
surf, by swimming out beyond a ledge of rock swarming with sharks,
at the risk every moment of a hideous death. There, as in other
places since, he had worked, like his elder brother at Montserrat,
as a true civiliser in every sense of the word; and, when his health
broke down from the noxious climate, had move