ch is
described by Waterton and others. It resembled rather the less
poetical sound of a woman beating a saucepan to make a swarm of bees
settle.

At one point we met a gang of Negroes felling timber to widen the
road. Fresh fallen trees, tied together with lianes, lay
everywhere. What a harvest for the botanist was among them! I
longed to stay there a week to examine and collect. But time
pressed; and, indeed, collecting plants in the wet season is a
difficult and disappointing work. In an air saturated with moisture
specimens turn black and mouldy, and drop to pieces; and unless
turned over and exposed to every chance burst of sunshine, the
labour of weeks is lost, if indeed meanwhile the ants, and other
creeping things, have not eaten the whole into rags.

Among these Negroes was one who excited my astonishment; not merely
for his size, though he was perhaps the tallest man whom I saw among
the usually tall Negroes of Trinidad; but for his features, which
were altogether European of the highest type; the forehead high and
broad, the cheek-bones flat, the masque long and oval, and the nose
aquiline and thin enough for any prince. Conscious of his own
beauty and strength, he stood up among the rest as an old Macedonian
might have stood up among the Egyptians he had conquered. We tried
to find out his parentage. My companions presumed he was an
'African,' i.e. imported during the times of slavery. He said No:
that he was a Creole, island born; but his father, it appeared, had
been in one of our Negro regiments, and had been settled afterwards
on a Government grant of land. Whether his beauty was the result of
'atavism'--of the reappearance, under the black skin and woolly
hair, of some old stain of white blood; or whether, which is more
probable, he came of some higher African race; one could not look at
him without hopeful surmises as to the possible rise of the Negro,
and as to the way in which it will come about--the only way in which
any race has permanently risen, as far as I can ascertain; namely,
by the appearance among them of sudden sports of nature; individuals
of an altogether higher type; such a man as that terrible Daaga,
whose story has been told. If I am any judge of physiognomy, such a
man as that, having--what the Negro has not yet had--'la carriere
ouverte aux talents,' might raise, not himself merely, but a whole
tribe, to an altogether new level in