ul
richness.

We now found ourselves in the wild country in which our missionary
stations lie. Hills rose around on every side; their surfaces broken and
furrowed into every fantastic variety of shape, with only distance
enough between their bases for the mountain streams to flow. In our
latitude such a country would be much of the time a bleak desolation.
But here the mantle of glorious and everlasting green softens and
enriches the broken and fluctuating surfaces into luxuriant and cloying
beauty. In such an ocean of verdure we now found ourselves, its emerald
waves rolling above, below, and around us. Our road, when once we had
surmounted the short hill, was a narrow, winding bridle path, which kept
along almost upon a level over a continual succession of natural
causeways, spanning the gullies with such an appearance of art as I have
never seen elsewhere. I afterward learned that these are dikes of trap,
from which the softer rock has been gradually disintegrated, leaving
them thus happily arranged for human convenience.

After three miles' travel over these roads of nature's making, in a rain
which at last became quite uncomfortable, we came finally to Oberlin
Mission House. A West Indian country house, without fire or carpets,
must be very pleasingly fitted up not to look dreary in a wet day, and
Oberlin House appeared rather cheerless as we alighted with streaming
garments, the romance pretty well soaked out of us for the time. But
after supper and a change of clothes, and the clearing away of the
clouds, our dismal spirits cleared up too, and we went out into the
garden to enjoy the rare flowers and plants--the crimson-leaved
ponsetto, the Bleeding Heart, with its ensanguined centre, the curiously
pied and twisted Croton Pictum, the Plumbago, well named from the leaden
hue of its flowers, the long, deep-red leaves of the Dragon's Blood, the
purple magnificence of the Passion flower, relieved by the more familiar
beauty of the Four o'clock and of the Martinique rose. Seeing something
that pleased me, I stepped forward to view it more narrowly, when a
sudden access of acute pain in one foot, quickly spreading to the knee,
admonished me that I had got into mischief in the shape of an ant's
nest, and gave me the first instalment of a lesson I learned in due time
very thoroughly, that the beauties of Jamaica are to be enjoyed with a
very cautious regard to the paramount rights of the insect creation.

When I went