l roll their long curved shoots over and over each other;
Gardenias fill the air with fragrance; and the Bougain-villia or the
Clerodendron cover some arbour with lilac or white racemes.

But this camp had not yet arrived at so high a state of
civilisation. All round it, almost up to the very doors, a tangle
of logs, stumps, branches, dead ropes and nets of liane lay still in
the process of clearing; and the ground was seemingly as waste, as
it was difficult--often impossible--to cross. A second glance,
however, showed that, amongst the stumps and logs, Indian corn was
planted everywhere; and that a few months would give a crop which
would richly repay the clearing, over and above the fact that the
whole materials of the house had been cut on the spot, and cost
nothing.

As for the situation of the little oasis in the wilderness, it
bespoke good sense and good taste. The owner had stumbled, in his
forest wanderings, on a spot where two mountain streams, after
nearly meeting, parted again, and enclosed in a ring a hill some
hundred feet high, before they finally joined each other below.
That ring was his estate; which was formally christened on the
occasion of our visit, Avoca--the meeting of the waters; a name, as
all agreed, full of remembrances of the Old World and the land of
his remote ancestors; and yet like enough to one of the graceful and
sonorous Indian names of the island not to seem barbarous and out of
place. Round the clearing the mountain woods surged up a thousand
feet aloft; but so gradually, and so far off, as to allow free
circulation of air and a broad sheet of sky overhead; and as the
camp stood on the highest point of the rise, it did not give that
choking and crushing sensation of being in a ditch, which makes
houses in most mountain valleys--to me at least--intolerable. Up
one glen, toward the south, we had a full view of the green Cerro of
Arima, three thousand feet in height; and down another, to the
north-east, was a great gate in the mountains, through which we
could hear--though not see--the surf rolling upon the rocks three
miles away.

I was woke that morning, as often before and afterwards, by a
clacking of stones; and, looking out, saw in the dusk a Negro
squatting, and hammering, with a round stone on a flat one, the
coffee which we were to drink in a quarter of an hour. It was
turned into a tin saucepan; put to boil over a firestick between