University of Virginia Library

JANUARY 10.

The houses here are generally built and arranged according to one and the same model. My own is of wood, partly raised upon pillars; it consists of a single floor: a long gallery, called a piazza, terminated at each end by a square room, runs the whole length of the house. Oil each side of the piazza is a range of bed-rooms, and the porticoes of the two fronts form two more rooms, with balustrades, and flights of steps descending to the lawn. The whole house is virandoed with shifting Venetian blinds to admit air ; except that one of the end rooms has sash-windows on account of the rains, which, when they arrive, are so heavy, and shift with the wind so suddenly from the one side to tile. other, that all the blinds are obliged to be kept closed ; consequently the whole house is in total darkness during their continuance, except the single sash-windowed room. There is nothing underneath except a few store-rooms and a kind of waiting-hall; but none of the domestic negroes sleep in tile house, all going home at night to their respective cottages and families.

Cornwall House stands on a dead flat, and the works are built in its immediate neighbourhood, for the convenience of their being the more under the agent's personal inspection (a point of material consequence with them all, but more particularly for the hospital).

This dead flat is only ornamented with a few scattered bread-fruit and cotton trees, a grove of mangoes, and the branch of a small river, which turns the mill. Several of these buildings are ugly enough; but the shops of the cooper, carpenter, and blacksmith, some of the trees in their vicinity,, and the negro-huts, embowered in shrubberies, and groves of oranges, plantains, cocoas, and pepper-trees, would be reek, picturesque in tile most ornamented grounds. A large spreading tamarind fronts me at this moment, and overshadows the stables, which are formed of open wickerwork; and an orangetree, loaded with fruit, grows against the window at which I am writing.

On three sides of the landscape the prospect is bounded by lofty purple mountains; and the variety of occupations going on all around me, and at the same time, give an inconceivable air of life and animation to the whole scene, especially as all those occupations look clean,-even those which in England look dirty. All the tradespeople are dressed in jackets and trousers, either white or of red and sky-blue stripe. One band of negroes an carrying the ripe canes on their heads to the mill; another set are conveying away the trash , after the juice has been extracted ; flocks of turkeys axe sheltering from the heat under the trees; the river is filled with ducks and geese; the coopers and carpenters are employed about the puncheons ; carts drawn some by six others by eight, oxen, are bringing loads of Indian corn from the fields; the black children are employed in gathering it into the granary, and in quarrelling with pigs as black as themselves, who are equally busy in stealing the corn whenever the children are looking another way: in short, a plantation possesses all the movement and interest of a farm, without its dung, and its stench, its dirty accompaniments.