e
drawling ensign of our boyhood, brave as a lion in the field, and in the
mess room or the drawing room an idiot, appears also to be dead as the
dodo. Those that one meets now are intelligent and superior men--no
trace of the frivolous sort left. Is it the effect of the abolition of
purchase, and competitive examinations? Is it that the times themselves
are growing serious, and even the most empty-headed feel that this is no
season for levity?

I had seen what Jamaican life was like in the upper spheres, and I had
heard the opinions that were current in them; but I wished to see other
parts of the country. I wished to see a class of people who were farther
from headquarters, and who might not all sing to the same note. I
determined to start off on an independent cruise of my own. In the
centre of the island, two thousand feet above the sea, it was reported
to me that I should find a delightful village called Mandeville, after
some Duke of Manchester who governed Jamaica a hundred years ago. The
scenery was said to have a special charm of its own, the air to be
exquisitely pure, the land to be well cultivated. Village manners were
to be found there of the old-fashioned sort, and a lodging house and
landlady of unequalled merit. There was a railway for the first fifty
miles. The line at starting crosses the mangrove swamps at the mouth of
the Cobre river. You see the trees standing in the water on each side of
the road. Rising slowly, it hardens into level grazing ground, stocked
with cattle and studded with mangoes and cedars. You pass Spanish Town,
of which only the roofs of the old State buildings are visible from the
carriages. Sugar estates follow, some of which are still in cultivation,
while ruined mills and fallen aqueducts show where others once had been.
The scenery becomes more broken as you begin to ascend into the hills.
River beds, dry when I saw them, but powerful torrents in the rainy
season, are crossed by picturesque bridges. You come to the forest,
where the squatters were at their usual work, burning out their yam
patches. Columns of white smoke were rising all about us, yet so
abundant the timber and so rapid the work of restoration when the
devastating swarm has passed, that in this direction they have as yet
made no marked impression, and the forest stretches as far as eye can
reach. The glens grew more narrow and the trees grander as the train
proceeded. After two hours we arrived at the present t