andy-
Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr.
Lover's hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe
the white gentleman with half a dozen of bottled beer; a case of
muddle-headed craft and elaborate silliness, which keeps no
proportion between the means and the end; so common in insane
persons; frequent, too, among the lower Irish, such as Handy Andy;
and very frequent, I am afraid, among the Negroes. But--as might
have been expected--the poor boy's moral sense had proved as shaky
as his intellectual powers. He had just taken a fancy to some goods
of his master's; and had retreated, to enjoy them the more securely,
into the southern forests, with a couple of brown policemen on his
track. So he was likely to undergo a more simple investigation than
that which was submitted to my analysis, viz. how he proposed to
wash the salt out of the sugar.

We arrived after a while at Valencia, a scattered hamlet in the
woods, with a good shop or 'store' upon a village green, under the
verandah whereof lay, side by side with bottled ale and biscuit
tins, bags of Carapo {265} nuts; trapezoidal brown nuts--enclosed
originally in a round fruit--which ought some day to form a valuable
article of export. Their bitter anthelminthic oil is said to have
medicinal uses; but it will be still more useful for machinery, as
it has--like that curious flat gourd the Sequa {266a}--the property
of keeping iron from rust. The tree itself, common here and in
Guiana, is one of the true Forest Giants; we saw many a noble
specimen of it in our rides. Its timber is tough, not over heavy,
and extensively used already in the island; while its bark is a
febrifuge and tonic. In fact it possesses all those qualities which
make its brethren, the Meliaceae, valuable throughout the Tropics.
But it is not the only tree of South America whose bark may be used
as a substitute for quinine. They may be counted possibly by
dozens. A glance at the excellent enumerations of the uses of
vegetable products to be found in Lindley's Vegetable Kingdom (a
monument of learning) will show how God provides, how man neglects
and wastes. As a single instance, the Laurels alone are known
already to contain several valuable febrifuges, among which the
Demerara Greenheart, or Bibiri, {266b} claims perhaps the highest
rank. 'Dr. Maclagan has shown,' says Dr. Lindley, 'that sulphate of
Bibiri acts with