The present Governor, like Sir Ralph Woodford before him, has been fully aware of the old saying—­which the Romans knew well, and which the English did not know, and only rediscovered some century since—­ that the ’first step in civilisation is to make roads; the second, to make more roads; and the third, to make more roads still.’

Through this very district (aided by men whose talents he had the talent to discover and employ) he has run wide, level, and sound roads, either already completed or in progress, through all parts of the island which I visited, save the precipitous glens of the northern shore.

Of such roads we saw more than one in the next few days.  That day we had to commit ourselves, when we turned off the royal road, to one of the old Spanish-Indian jungle tracks.  And here is a recipe for making one:—­Take a railway embankment of average steepness, strew it freely with wreck, rigging and all, to imitate the fallen timber, roots, and lianes—­a few flagstones and boulders here and there will be quite in place; plant the whole with the thickest pheasant-cover; set a field of huntsmen to find their way through it at the points of least resistance three times a week during a wet winter; and if you dare follow their footsteps, you will find a very accurate imitation of a forest-track in the wet season.

At one place we seemed to be fairly stopped.  We plunged and slid down into a muddy brook, luckily with a gravel bar on which the horses could stand, at least one by one; and found opposite us a bank of smooth clay, bound with slippery roots, some ten feet high.  We stood and looked at it, and the longer we looked—­in hunting phrase—­the less we liked it.  But there was no alternative.  Some one jumped off, and scrambled up on his hands and knees; his horse was driven up the bank to him—­on its knees, likewise, more than once—­and caught staggering among boughs and mud; and by the time the whole cavalcade was over, horses and men looked as if they had been brickmaking for a week.

But here again the cunning of these horses surprised me.  On one very steep pitch, for instance, I saw before me two logs across the path, two feet and more in diameter, and what was worse, not two feet apart.  How the brown cob meant to get over I could not guess; but as he seemed not to falter or turn tail, as an English horse would have done, I laid the reins on his neck and watched his legs.  To my astonishment, he lifted a fore-leg out of the abyss of mud, put it between the logs, where I expected to hear it snap; clawed in front, and shuffled behind; put the other over the second log, the mud and water splashing into my face, and then brought the first freely out from between the logs, and—­horrible to see—­put a hind one in.  Thus did he fairly walk through the whole; stopped a moment to get his breath; and then staggered and scrambled upward again, as if he had