’While all the land,
Beneath a broad and equal-blowing breeze,
Smelt of the coming summer;’

for it was winter then, and only 80 degrees in the shade, till the road entered the virgin forest, through which it has been driven, on the American principle of making land valuable by beginning with a road, and expecting settlers to follow it.  Some such settlers we found, clearing right and left; among them a most satisfactory sight; namely, more than one Coolie family, who had served their apprenticeship, saved money, bought Government land, and set up as yeomen; the foundation, it is to be hoped, of a class of intelligent and civilised peasant proprietors.  These men, as soon as they have cleared as much land as their wives and children, with their help, can keep in order, go off, usually, in gangs of ten to fifteen, to work, in many instances, on the estates from which they originally came.  This fact practically refutes the opinion which was at first held by some attorneys and managers of sugar-estates, that the settling of free Indian immigrants would materially affect the labour supply of the colony.  I must express an earnest hope that neither will any planters be short-sighted enough to urge such a theory on the present Governor, nor will the present Governor give ear to it.  The colony at large must gain by the settlement of Crown lands by civilised people like the Hindoos, if it be only through the increased exports and imports; while the sugar-estates will become more and more sure of a constant supply of labour, without the heavy expense of importing fresh immigrants.  I am assured that the only expense to the colony is the fee for survey, amounting to eighteen dollars for a ten-acre allotment, as the Coolie prefers the thinly-wooded and comparatively poor lands, from the greater facility of clearing them; and these lands are quite unsaleable to other customers.  Therefore, for less than 4 pounds, an acclimatised Indian labourer with his family (and it must be remembered that, while the Negro families increase very slowly, the Coolies increase very rapidly, being more kind and careful parents) are permanently settled in the colony, the man to work five days a week on sugar-estates, the family to grow provisions for the market, instead of being shipped back to India at a cost, including gratuities and etceteras, of not less than 50 pounds.

One clearing we reached—­were I five-and-twenty I should like to make just such another next to it—­of a higher class still.  A cultivated Scotchman, now no longer young, but hale and mighty, had taken up three hundred acres, and already cleared a hundred and fifty; and there he intended to pass the rest of a busy life, not under his own vine and fig-tree, but under his own castor-oil and cacao-tree.  We were welcomed by as noble a Scot’s face as I ever saw, and as keen a Scot’s eye; and taken in and fed, horses and men, even too sumptuously, in a palm and timber house.  Then we wandered out to see the site of his intended mansion, with the rich wooded hills of the Latagual to the north, and all around the unbroken forest, where, he told us, the howling monkeys shouted defiance morning and evening at him who did