At every valley mouth the beating of the waves tends all the year round to throw up a bank of sand and shingle, damming the land-water back to form a lagoon.  This might indeed empty itself during the floods of the rainy season; but during the dry season it must remain a stagnant pond, filling gradually with festering vegetable matter from the hills, beer-coloured, and as hideous to look at as it is to smell.  Were there a tide, as in England, of from ten to twenty feet, that swamp would be drained twice a day to nearly that depth; and healthy vegetation, as in England, establish itself down to the very beach.  A tide of a foot or eighteen inches only, as is too common in the West Indies, will only drain the swamp to that depth; and probably, if there be any strong pebble-bearing surf outside, not at all.  So there it all lies, festering in the sun, and cooking poison day and night; while the mangroves and graceful white roseaux {115a} (tall canes) kindly do their best to lessen the mischief, by rooting in the slush, and absorbing the poison with their leaves.  A white man, sleeping one night on the edge of that pestilential little triangle, half an acre in size, would be in danger of catching a fever and ague, which would make a weaker man of him for the rest of his life.  And yet so thoroughly fitted for the climate is the Negro, that not ten yards from the edge of the mud stood a comfortable negro-house, with stout healthy folk therein, evidently well to do in the world, to judge from the poultry, and the fruit-trees and provision-ground which stretched up the glen.

Through the provision-ground we struggled up, among weeds as high as our shoulders; so that it was difficult, as usual, to distinguish garden from forest.  But no matter to the black owner.  The weeds were probably of only six weeks’ growth; and when they got so high that he actually could not find his tanias {115b} among them, he would take cutlass and hoe, and make a lazy raid upon them, or rather upon a quarter of them, certain of two facts; that in six weeks more they would be all as high as ever; and that if they were, it did not matter; for so fertile is the soil, so genial the climate, that he would get in spite of them more crop off the ground than he needed.  ’Pity the poor weeds.  Is there not room enough in the world for them and for us?’ seems the Negro’s motto.  But he knows his own business well enough, and can exert himself when he really needs to do so; and if the weeds harmed him seriously he would make short work with them.  Still this soil, and this climate, put a premium on bad farming, as they do on much else that is bad.