out wedge shaped
leaves some ten or twelve feet long, sometimes all but entire,
sometimes irregularly pinnate, because the space between the
straight and parallel side nerves has not been filled up. These
flat wedge-shaped sheets, often six feet across, and the oblong
pinnae, some three feet long by six inches to a foot in breadth,
make admirable thatch; and on emergency, as we often saw that day,
good umbrellas. Bundles of them lay along the roadside, tied up,
ready for carrying away, and each Negro or Negress whom we passed
carried a Timit-leaf, and hooked it on to his head when a gush of
rain came down.

After a while we turned off the high road into a forest path, which
was sound enough, the soil being one sheet of poor sand and white
quartz gravel, which would in Scotland, or even Devonshire, have
carried nothing taller than heath, but was here covered with
impenetrable jungle. The luxuriance of this jungle, be it
remembered, must not delude a stranger, as it has too many ere now,
into fancying that the land would be profitable under cultivation.
As long as the soil is shaded and kept damp, it will bear an
abundant crop of woody fibre, which, composed almost entirely of
carbon and water, drains hardly any mineral constituents from the
soil. But if that jungle be once cleared off, the slow and careful
work of ages has been undone in a moment. The burning sun bakers up
everything; and the soil, having no mineral staple wherewith to
support a fresh crop if planted, is reduced to aridity and sterility
for years to come. Timber, therefore, I believe, and timber only,
is the proper crop for these poor soils, unless medicinal or
otherwise useful trees should be discovered hereafter worth the
planting. To thin out the useless timbers--but cautiously, for fear
of letting in the sun's rays--and to replace them by young plants of
useful timbers, is all that Government can do with the poorer bits
of these Crown lands, beyond protecting (as it does now to the best
of its power) the natural crop of Timit-leaves from waste and
destruction. So much it ought to do; and so much it can and will do
in Trinidad, which--happily for it--possesses a Government which
governs, instead of leaving every man, as in the Irishman's
paradise, to 'do what is right in the sight of his own eyes, and
what is wrong too, av he likes.' Without such wise regulation, and
even restraint, of the ignorant gree