ill shown, and the
gallery where he walked up and down with his long pipe. His memory is
cherished in the island as of some singular and beautiful presence which
still hovers about the scenes which so delighted him in the closing
evening of his own life.

It was the dry season, mid-winter, yet raining every day for two or
three hours, and when it rains in these countries it means business.
When the sky cleared the sun was intolerably hot, and distant
expeditions under such conditions suited neither my age nor my health.
With cocktail I might have ventured, but to cocktail I could never
heartily reconcile myself. Trinidad has one wonder in it, a lake of
bitumen some ninety acres in extent, which all travellers are expected
to visit, and which few residents care to visit. A black lake is not so
beautiful as an ordinary lake. I had no doubt that it existed, for the
testimony was unimpeachable. Indeed I was shown an actual specimen of
the crystallised pitch itself. I could believe without seeing and
without undertaking a tedious journey. I rather sympathised with a noble
lord who came to Port of Spain in his yacht, and like myself had the
lake impressed upon him. As a middle course between going thither and
appearing to slight his friends' recommendations, he said that he would
send his steward.

In Trinidad, as everywhere else, my own chief desire was to see the
human inhabitants, to learn what they were doing, how they were living,
and what they were thinking about, and this could best be done by drives
about the town and neighbourhood. The cultivated land is a mere fringe
round the edges of the forest. Three-fourths of the soil are untouched.
The rivers running out of the mountains have carved out the usual long
deep valleys, and spread the bottoms with rich alluvial soil. Here among
the wooded slopes are the country houses of the merchants. Here are the
cabins of the black peasantry with their cocoa and coffee and orange
plantations, which as in Grenada they hold largely as freeholds,
reproducing as near as possible the life in Paradise of our first
parents, without the consciousness of a want which they are unable to
gratify, not compelled to work, for the earth of her own self bears for
them all that they need, and ignorant that there is any difference
between moral good and evil.

Large sugar estates, of course, there still are, and as the owners have
not succeeded in bringing the negroes to work regularly for the