esponds more fully with the usual idea of a
tropical land.

The luxuriance and the glory of nature are the same now as ever; but
everywhere over the island the traveller sees the melancholy evidences
of the decay of former wealth. You may travel over miles and miles on
the plains once rich with the cane, or ridge after ridge in the uplands
once covered with the dark-green coffee plantations, which now are
almost a wilderness. To quote the language of another, 'ridges,
overgrown with guava bushes, mark the cornfields; rank vegetation fills
the courtyard, and even bursts through the once hospitable roof. A curse
seems to have fallen upon the land, as if this generation were atoning
for the sins of the past. For while we lament the ruin of the present
proprietors, we cannot forget the unrequited toil which in times gone by
created the wealth they have lost; nor that hapless race, the original
owners of the soil, whose fate darkens the saddest page in history.'

A passing traveller will see little to compensate the sadness occasioned
by old magnificence thus in ruins, strewing the whole island with its
melancholy wrecks. What there is to set off against it, we shall
consider hereafter.

What survives of the agriculture and commerce of Jamaica is still, as
formerly, mainly dependent on the two great staples, sugar and coffee;
the former being raised chiefly in the plains and valleys, the latter in
the uplands and mountains. There was, it is said, an indigenous sugar
cane in the West Indies, when first discovered; but if so, it has long
been supplanted by the Mauritius cane, which is now cultivated. The
joints of the cane, being cut and laid horizontally in furrows, which
are then covered over, spring up in a crop which comes to maturity in
about a year; and when this is cut, the roots rattoon, or send up shoots
for five or six years in succession. This is one reason why Jamaica
sugar planters find it so hard to compete with Cuban production. On the
deep soil of Cuba the cane rattoons, it is said, not five or six, but
forty years in succession.

The coffee plant is a beautiful shrub. Left to itself, it would grow
twenty or thirty feet high; but it is kept down to such a height as that
the berries can easily be picked by the hand. Its glossy, dark-green
leaves resemble a good deal the jessamine; and the resemblance is
increased during the time of flowering, by the beautiful white blossoms,
of a faint, delicate fragrance, w