ace as they please. She
spins on upon her own course; and seas and skies, and crags and forests,
are spiritual and beautiful as ever.

Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath
Newcastle. Colonel J---- had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me
over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the
mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river,
which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was
now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed
were round as cannon balls, and, weighing hundreds of tons, show what
its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of
the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter
level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow
there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory:
ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum
trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags,
and hanging out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall
spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with
green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we
drove along, frowned the great limestone blocks which thunder down when
loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are
less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks,
who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the
timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single
one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is
merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become
bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines are marked more sharply
against the sky.

Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the river two or
three miles, when it was crossed by a bridge, above which stood my
friend Miss Burton's lodging house, where she had designed entertaining
me. At Gordon's Town, which is again a mile farther on, the valley
widens out, and there are cocoa and coffee plantations. Through an
opening we saw far above our heads, like specks of snow against the
mountain side, the homes or prisons of our unfortunate troops.
Overlooking the village through which we were passing, and three hundred
feet above it, was perched the Colonel's villa on a projecting