What a field was there for native art; for richest ornamentation of these pillars and those beams.  Surely Trinidad, and the whole of northern South America, ought to become some day the paradise of wood carvers, who, copying even a few of the numberless vegetable and animal forms around, may far surpass the old wood-carving schools of Burmah and Hindostan.  And I sat dreaming of the lianes which might be made to wreathe the pillars; the flowers, fruits, birds, butterflies, monkeys, kinkajous, and what not, which might cluster about the capitals, or swing along the beams.  Let men who have such materials, and such models, proscribe all tawdry and poor European art—­most of it a bad imitation of bad Greek, or worse Renaissance—­and trust to Nature and the facts which lie nearest them.  But when will a time come for the West Indies when there will be wealth and civilisation enough to make such an art possible?  Soon, if all the employers of labour were like the gentleman at whose house we were that day, and like some others in the same island.

And through the windows and between the pillars of the gallery, what a blaze of colour and light.  The ground-floor was hedged in, a few feet from the walls, with high shrubs, which would have caused unwholesome damp in England, but were needed here for shade.  Foreign Crotons, Dracaenas, Cereuses, and a dozen more curious shapes—­among them a ‘cup-tree,’ with concave leaves, each of which would hold water.  It was said to come from the East, and was unknown to me.  Among them, and over the door, flowering creepers tangled and tossed, rich with flowers; and beyond them a circular-lawn (rare in the West Indies), just like an English one, save that the shrubs and trees which bounded it were hothouse plants.  A few Carat-palms {184} spread their huge fan-leaves among the curious flowering trees; other foreign palms, some of them very rare, beside them; and on the lawn opposite my bedroom window stood a young Palmiste, which had been planted barely eight years, and was now thirty-eight feet in height, and more than six feet in girth at the butt.  Over the roofs of the outhouses rose scarlet Bois immortelles, and tall clumps of Bamboo reflecting blue light from their leaves even under a cloud; and beyond them and below them to the right, a park just like an English one carried stately trees scattered on the turf, and a sheet of artificial water.  Coolies, in red or yellow waistcloths, and Coolie children, too, with nothing save a string round their stomachs (the smaller ones at least), were fishing in the shade.  To the left, again, began at once the rich cultivation of the rolling cane-fields, among which the Squire had left standing, somewhat against the public opinion of his less tasteful neighbours, tall Carats, carrying their heads of fan-leaves on smooth stalks from fifty to eighty feet high, and Ceibas—­some of them the hugest I had ever seen.  Below in the valley were the sugar-works; and beyond this half-natural, half-artificial scene rose, some mile off, the lowering wall of the yet untouched forest.