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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
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