of clothing beside? And
what wonder if we grown-up whites made fools' caps too, for children
on the other side of the Atlantic? During which process we found--
what all said they had never seen before--that one of the spadices
carried two caps, one inside the other, and one exactly like the
other; a wanton superfluity of Nature, which I should like to hear
explained by some morphologist.

We rode away from that hospitable group of huts, whither we were to
return in two or three days; and along the green trace once more.
As we rode, M--- the civiliser of Montserrat and I side by side,
talking of Cuba, and staring at the Noranteas overhead, a dull sound
was heard, as if the earth had opened; as indeed it had, engulfing
in the mud the whole forehand of M---'s mule; and there he knelt,
his beard outspread upon the clay, while the mule's visage looked
patiently out from under his left arm. However, it was soft falling
there. The mule was hauled out by main force. As for cleaning
either her or the rider, that was not thought of in a country where
they were sure to be as dirty as ever in an hour; and so we rode on,
after taking a note of the spot, and, as it happened, forgetting it
again--one of us at least.

On again, along the green trace, which rose now to a ridge, with
charming glimpses of wooded hills and glens to right and left; past
comfortable squatters' cottages, with cacao drying on sheets at the
doors or under sheds; with hedges of dwarf Erythrina, dotted with
red jumby beads, and here and there that pretty climbing vetch, the
Overlook. {270} I forgot, by the by, to ask whether it is planted
here, as in Jamaica, to keep off the evil eye, or 'overlook'; whence
its name. Nor can I guess what peculiarity about the plant can have
first made the Negro fix on it as a fetish. The genesis of folly is
as difficult to analyse as the genesis of most other things.

All this while the dull thunder of the surf was growing louder and
louder; till, not as in England over a bare down, but through
thickest foliage down to the high tide mark, we rode out upon the
shore, and saw before us a right noble sight; a flat, sandy, surf
beaten shore, along which stretched, in one grand curve, lost at
last in the haze of spray, fourteen miles of Coco palms.

This was the Cocal; and it was worth coming all the way from England
to see it alone. I at once felt the truth of my host's saying, that
if