The manager rides up, probably under an umbrella, as you are, and a pleasant and instructive chat follows, wound up, usually, if the house be not far off, by an invitation to come in and have a light drink; an invitation which, considering the state of the thermometer, you will be tempted to accept, especially as you know that the claret and water will be excellent.  And so you dawdle on, looking at this and that new and odd sight, but most of all feasting your eyes on the beauty of the northern mountains, till you reach the gentle rise on which stands, eight miles from Port of Spain, the little city of San Josef.  We should call it, here in England, a village:  still, it is not every village in England which has fought the Dutch, and earned its right to be called a city by beating some of the bravest sailors of the seventeenth century.  True, there is not a single shop in it with plate-glass windows:  but what matters that, if its citizens have all that civilised people need, and more, and will heap what they have on the stranger so hospitably that they almost pain him by the trouble which they take?  True, no carriages and pairs, with powdered footmen, roll about the streets; and the most splendid vehicles you are likely to meet are American buggies—­ four-wheeled gigs with heads, and aprons through which the reins can be passed in wet weather.  But what matters that, as long as the buggies keep out sun and rain effectually, and as long as those who sit in them be real gentlemen, and those who wait for them at home, whether in the city, or the estates around, be real ladies?  As for the rest—­peace, plenty, perpetual summer, time to think and read—­ (for there are no daily papers in San Josef)—­and what can man want more on earth?  So I thought more than once, as I looked at San Josef nestling at the mouth of its noble glen, and said to myself,—­ If the telegraph cable were but laid down the islands, as it will be in another year or two, and one could hear a little more swiftly and loudly the beating of the Great Mother’s heart at home, then would San Josef be about the most delectable spot which I have ever seen for a cultivated and civilised man to live, and work, and think, and die in.

San Josef has had, nevertheless, its troubles and excitements more than once since it defeated the Dutch.  Even as late as 1837, it was, for a few hours, in utter terror and danger from a mutiny of free black recruits.  No one in the island, civil or military, seems to have been to blame for the mishap.  It was altogether owing to the unwisdom of military authorities at home, who seem to have fancied that they could transform, by a magical spurt of the pen, heathen savages into British soldiers.

The whole tragedy—­for tragedy it was—­is so curious, and so illustrative of the negro character, and of the effects of the slave trade, that I shall give it at length, as it stands in that clever little History of Trinidad, by M. Thomas, which I have quoted more than once:—­