He dries his Cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps sold in Paris to the chocolate makers, who convert them into chocolate, Menier or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla, both, possibly, from this very island.  This latter fact once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris.  And (so goes the story) he succeeded.  But the fair Creoles would not buy it.  It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and from that centre of fashion, Paris.  So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat nought but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times as much as home made chocolate need cost.

As we walked on through the trace (for the tramway here was still unfinished) one of my kind companions pointed out a little plant, which bears in the island the ominous name of the Brinvilliers. {127} It is one of those deadly poisons too common in the bush, and too well known to the negro Obi men and Obi-women.  And as I looked at the insignificant weed I wondered how the name of that wretched woman should have spread to this remote island, and have become famous enough to be applied to a plant.  French Negroes may have brought the name with them:  but then arose another wonder.  How were the terrible properties of the plant discovered?  How eager and ingenious must the human mind be about the devil’s work, and what long practice—­considering its visual slowness and dulness—­must it have had at the said work, ever to have picked out this paltry thing among the thousand weeds of the forest as a tool for its jealousy and revenge.  It may have taken ages to discover the Brinvilliers, and ages more to make its poison generally known.  Why not?  As the Spaniards say, ‘The devil knows many things, because he is old.’  Surely this is one of the many facts which point toward some immensely ancient civilisation in the Tropics, and a civilisation which may have had its ugly vices, and have been destroyed thereby.

Now we left the Cacao grove:  and I was aware, on each side of the trace, of a wall of green, such as I had never seen before on earth, not even in my dreams; strange colossal shapes towering up, a hundred feet and more in height, which, alas! it was impossible to reach; for on either side of the trace were fifty yards of half-cleared ground, fallen logs, withes, huge stumps ten feet high, charred and crumbling; and among them and over them a wilderness of creepers and shrubs, and all the luxuriant young growth of the