od-humour, satisfied with having prospectively outshone Pompey; for,
he presently broke out with one of his happy African laughs, which told
me as plainly as words the little unpleasantness of the past was now
dismissed from his thoughts.

As we rode on, at first downwards and then up a steep hillside again,
the path winding by the edge of a precipice most of the way, we came
across further traces of the force of the recent storm. Large trees
were at one place stretched across the road, their massive trunks having
been rended by the lightning; while the sudden deluge of rain had
channelled little streams through the red clay. These coursed along
like so many independent rivulets, right under our horses' hoofs,
rippling onward light-heartedly, until they came to one of the many
broad ditches or gullies, that intersected our track at intervals, the
contents of which they swelled to such an extent that we frequently had
great difficulty in fording them, the water reaching quite up to
Prince's girths, and the current being so strong as to almost sweep him
off his legs.

The scenery on either hand was grand.

On the right, plantations of cocoa and nutmeg trees stretched up the
slopes of hills, which all converged towards a central mountain peak
that overtopped all the rest by many hundred feet. This was crowned by
the extinct crater of a volcano, now filled with water and known as Le
Grand Etang. On the left, were valleys and gorges of the richest green,
with here and there a tall silk-cotton tree or graceful palm elevating
itself above the other wood-nymphs, the smoke of charcoal burners
dotting the landscape from amid the thickest part of the forest growth
of green with curling wreaths of grey.

We soon reached a wide plateau just above Government House, where the
best view in the whole island was to be obtained, above which towered
the old battery on Richmond Hill, armed with obsolete and worm-eaten
thirty-two pounders, once deemed sufficient protection for the Carenage
or harbour below, which it commanded. Fort George, another
fortification equally powerless nowadays either for attack or defence,
lay on the right; and looking beyond, over a series of terraces of
villas and gardens, and negro provision grounds, the open sea could be
seen stretching away to the Boccas of the Gulf of Paria and the Serpent
Passage which divides the island of Trinidad from the main coast of
British Guiana.

I could see, on arriving