spur
where a tributary of the Hope river has carved out a second ravine. We
drove to the door up a steep winding lane among coffee bushes, which
scented the air with their jessamine-like blossom, and wild oranges on
which the fruit hung untouched, glowing like balls of gold. We were now
eleven hundred feet above the sea. The air was already many degrees
cooler than at Kingston. The ground in front of the house was levelled
for a garden. Ivy was growing about the trellis work, and scarlet
geraniums and sweet violets and roses which cannot be cultivated in the
lower regions, were here in full bloom. Elsewhere in the grounds there
was a lawn tennis court to tempt the officers down from their eyrie in
the clouds. The house was empty, in charge of servants. From the balcony
in front of the drawing room we saw peak rising behind peak, till the
highest, four thousand feet above us, was lost in the white mist. Below
was the valley of the Hope river with its gardens and trees and
scattered huts, with buildings here and there of higher pretensions. On
the other side the tributary stream rushed down its own ravine, while
the breeze among the trees and the sound of the falling waters swayed up
to us in intermittent pulsations.

[ILLUSTRATION: VALLEY IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, JAMAICA.]

The place had been made, I believe, in the days of plantation
prosperity. What would become of it all, if Jamaica drifted after her
sisters in the Antilles, as some persons thought that she was
drifting, and became, like Grenada, an island of small black
proprietors? Was such a fate really hanging over her? Not necessarily,
not by any law of nature. If it came, it would come from the
dispiritment, the lack of energy and hope in the languid representatives
of the English colonists; for the land even in the mountains will grow
what it is asked to grow, and men do not live by sugar alone; and my
friend Dr. Nicholl in Dominica and Colonel Duncan in Grenada itself were
showing what English energy could do if it was alive and vigorous. The
pale complaining beings of whom I saw too many, seemed as if they could
not be of the same race as the men who ruled in the days of the slave
trade. The question to be asked in every colony is, what sort of men is
it rearing? If that cannot be answered satisfactorily, the rest is not
worth caring for. The blacks do not deserve the ill that is spoken of
them. Colonel J----'s house is twelve miles from Kingston. He told me