University of Virginia Library

January 4.

There were three things against which I was particularly cautioned, and which three things I was determined not to do,-to take exercise after ten in the day ; to be exposed to the dews after sun-down; and to sleep at a Jamaica lodging-house. So, yesterday, I set off for Montego Bay at eight o'clock in the morning, and travelled till three; walked home from a ball after midnight; and that home was a lodging-house at Montego Bay; but the lodging-house was such a cool, clean lodging-house, and the landlady was such an obliging, smiling landlady, with the whitest of all possible teeth, and the blackest of all possible eyes, that no harm. could happen to me from occupying, an apartment -which been prepared by her. She was called out of her bed to make my room read for me; Yet she did everything with so much good will and cordiality-no quick answers, no mutterings : inns would be bowers of Paradise if they were all rented by mulatto landladies like Judy James.

I was much pleased with the scenery of Montego Bay, and with the neatness and cleanliness of the town; indeed, what with the sea washing it, and the picturesque aspect of the piazzas and verandas, it is impossible for a West Indian town so situated, and in such a climate, not to present an agreeable appearance. But the first. part of the road exceeds in beauty all that I have ever seen; it wound through mountain-lands of my own, their summits of the boldest, and at the same time of the most beautiful shapes; their sides ornamented with bright green woods of bamboo, logwood, prickly-yellow, broad-leaf, and trumpet trees; and so completely covered with the most lively verdure, that once, when we found a piece of barren rock, Cubina pointed it out to me as a curiosity,-" Look, Massa, rock", quite naked!" The cotton-tree presented itself on all-sides; but as this is the season for its shedding its leaves, its wide-

spreading bare white arms contributed nothing to the beauty of the scene, except where the wild-fig and various creeping plants had completely mantled the stems and branches; and then its gigantic height, and the fantastic wreathings of its limbs, from which numberless green withes and strings of wild flowers were streaming, rendered it exactly the very tree for which a landscape-painter would have wished. The air, too, was delicious; the flagrance of the sweet-wood, and of several other scented trees, but, above all, of the delicious logwood (of which most of the fences in Westmoreland are made), composed an atmosphere such, that if Satan, after promising them "a buxom air, embalmed with odours," had transported Sin and' Death thither, the charming couple must have acknowledged their papa's promises fulfilled.

We travelled the first ten miles (Montego Bay being about thirty from my estate of Cornwall) without seeing a human creature; nor, indeed, anything that had life in it, except a black snake basking in the sunshine, and a few John-Crows -a species of vulture, whose utility is so great that its destruction is prohibited by law, under a heavy penalty. In a country where putrefaction is so rapid, it is of infinite consequence to preserve an animal which, if a bullock or horse falls dead in the held, immediately flies to the carcass before it has time to corrupt, and gobbles it up before you can say " John Crow," much less " Jack Robinson.". The bite of the black snake is slightly venomous, but that is all-, as to the great yellow one, it -is perfectly innoxious, and so timid that it always runs away from you. The only dangerous species of serpent is the whip-snake, so called from its exactly resembling the lash of a whip, in length, thinness, pliability, and whiteness; but even the bite of this is not mortal) except from very great neglect, The most beautiful tree, c rather group of trees, all to nothing, is the bamboo, both from its Verdure and from its elegance of form : as to the -cotton-tree it answers no purpose, either of ornament or utility; or, rather it is not suffered to answer any, since it is forbidden by law to export its down, lest it should hurt the fur trade in the manufacture of hats: its only present use is to furnish the negroes, with canoes, which are hollowed out of its immense trunks. I am yet so much enchanted with the country, that it would require

no very strong additional inducements to make me establish myself here altogether ; and, in that case, my first care would be to build for myself a cottage among these mountains, in which I might pass the sultry months,-