prickly hairs, which give the Coolies sore shins if they work bare-legged.  The soil here, as everywhere, was exceedingly rich, and sawn out into rolling mounds and steep gullies—­sometimes almost too steep for cane-cultivation—­by the tropic rains.  If, as cannot be doubted, denudation by rain has gone on here, for thousands of years, at the same pace at which it goes on now, the amount of soil removed must be very great; so great, that the Naparimas may have been, when they were first uplifted out of the Gulf, hundreds of feet higher than they are now.

Another tree we went to see in the home park, of which I would have gladly obtained a photograph.  A Poix doux, {187a} some said it was; others that it was a Figuier. {187b} I incline to the former belief, as the leaves seemed to me pinnated:  but the doubt was pardonable enough.  There was not a leaf on the tree which was not nigh one hundred feet over our heads.  For size of spurs and wealth of parasites the tree was almost as remarkable as the Ceiba I mentioned just now.  But the curiosity of the tree was a Carat-palm which had started between its very roots; had run its straight and slender stem up parallel with the bole of its companion, and had then pierced through the head of the tree, and all its wilderness of lianes, till it spread its huge flat crown of fans among the highest branches, more than a hundred feet aloft.  The contrast between the two forms of vegetation, each so grand, but as utterly different in every line as they are in botanical affinities, and yet both living together in such close embrace, was very noteworthy; a good example of the rule, that while competition is most severe between forms most closely allied, forms extremely wide apart may not compete at all, because each needs something which the other does not.

On our return I was introduced to the ‘Uncle Tom’ of the neighbourhood, who had come down to spend Sunday at the Squire’s house.  He was a middle-sized Negro, in cast of features not above the average, and Isaac by name.  He told me how he had been born in Baltimore, a slave to a Quaker master; how he and his wife Mary, during the second American war, ran away, and after hiding three days in the bush, got on board a British ship of war, and so became free.  He then enlisted into one of the East Indian regiments, and served some years; as a reward for which he had given him his five acres of land in Trinidad, like others of his corps.  These Negro yeomen-veterans, let it be said in passing, are among the ablest and steadiest of the coloured population.  Military service has given them just enough of those habits of obedience of which slavery gives too much—­if the obedience of a mere slave, depending not on the independent will, but on brute fear, is to be called obedience at all.