ose large yellow fruits hang ready to be
plucked, and eaten principally for a few seeds of the shape and
colour of young cockroaches. If he be a prudent man (especially if
he lives in Jamaica), he will have a plant of the pretty Overlook
pea, {314d} trailing aloft somewhere, to prevent his garden being
'overlooked,' i.e. bewitched by an evil eye, in case the Obeah-
bottle which hangs from the Mango-tree, charged with toad and
spider, dirty water, and so forth, has no terrors for his secret
enemy. He will have a Libidibi {314e} tree, too, for astringent
medicine; and his hedge will be composed, if he be a man of taste--
as he often seems to be--of Hibiscus bushes, whose magnificent
crimson flowers contrast with the bright yellow bunches of the
common Cassia, and the scarlet flowers of the Jumby-bead bush,
{314f} and blue and white and pink Convolvuluses. The sulphur and
purple Neerembergia of our hothouses, which is here one mass of
flower at Christmas, and the creeping Crab's-eye Vine, {314g} will
scramble over the fence; while, as a finish to his little Paradise,
he will have planted at each of its four corners an upright
Dragon's-blood {314h} bush, whose violet and red leaves bedeck our
dinner-tables in winter; and are here used, from their unlikeness to
any other plant in the island, to mark boundaries.

I have not dared--for fear of prolixity--to make this catalogue as
complete as I could have done. But it must be remembered that, over
and above all this, every hedge and wood furnishes wild fruit more
or less eatable; the high forests plenty of oily seeds, in which the
tropic man delights; and woods, forests, and fields medicinal plants
uncounted. 'There is more medicine in the bush, and better, than in
all the shops in Port of Spain,' said a wise medical man to me; and
to the Exhibition of 1862 Mr. M'Clintock alone contributed, from
British Guiana, one hundred and forty species of barks used as
medicine by the Indians. There is therefore no fear that the
tropical small farmer should suffer, either from want, or from
monotony of food; and equally small fear lest, when his children
have eaten themselves sick--as they are likely to do if, like the
Negro children, they are eating all day long--he should be unable to
find something in the hedge which will set them all right again.

At the amount of food which a man can get off this little patch I
dare not guess. Well says Humbol