ific 'grande culture';
and it will need several generations of training ere he recovers
them. Garden-tillage and spade-farming are not learnt in a day,
especially when they depend--as they always must in temperate
climates--for their main profit on some article which requires
skilled labour to prepare it for the market--on flax, for instance,
silk, wine, or fruits. An average English labourer, I fear, if put
in possession of half a dozen acres of land, would fare as badly as
the poor Chartists who, some twenty years ago, joined in Feargus
O'Connor's land scheme, unless he knew half a dozen ways of eking
out a livelihood which even our squatters around Windsor and the New
Forest are, alas! forgetting, under the money-making and man-
unmaking influences of the 'division of labour.' He is vanishing
fast, the old bee-keeping, apple-growing, basket-making, copse-
cutting, many-counselled Ulysses of our youth, as handy as a sailor:
and we know too well what he leaves behind him; grandchildren better
fed, better clothed, better taught than he, but his inferiors in
intellect and in manhood, because--whatever they may be taught--they
cannot be taught by schooling to use their fingers and their wits.
I fear, therefore, that the average English labourer would not
prosper here. He has not stamina enough for the hard work of the
sugar plantation. He has not wit and handiness enough for the more
delicate work of a little spade-farm: and he would sink, as the
Negro seems inclined to sink, into a mere grower of food for
himself; or take to drink--as too many of the white immigrants to
certain West Indian colonies did thirty years ago--and burn the life
out of himself with new rum. The Hindoo immigrant, on the other
hand, has been trained by long ages to a somewhat scientific
agriculture, and civilised into the want of many luxuries for which
the Negro cares nothing; and it is to him that we must look, I
think, for a 'petite culture' which will do justice to the
inexhaustible wealth of the West Indian soil and climate.

As for the house, which is embowered in the little Paradise which I
have been describing, I am sorry to say that it is, in general, the
merest wooden hut on stilts; the front half altogether open and
unwalled; the back half boarded up to form a single room, a passing
glance into which will not make the stranger wish to enter, if he
has any nose, or any dislike of vermin. The g