’No, you could not.  I should have cut you down first:  so don’t play the fool,’ answered the official quietly, hand on cutlass.

The wild man gave in; paid his rates; received the Crown title for his land; and became (as have all these sons of the forest) fast friends with one whom they have learnt at once to love and fear.

But among the Montserrat hills, the Governor had struck on a spot so fit for a new settlement, that he determined to found one forthwith.  The quick-eyed Jesuits had founded a mission on the same spot many years before.  But all had lapsed again into forest.  A group of enormous Palmistes stands on a plateau, flat, and yet lofty and healthy.  The soil is exceeding fertile.  There are wells and brooks of pure water all around.  The land slopes down for hundreds of feet in wooded gorges, full of cedar and other admirable timber, with Palmistes towering over them everywhere.  Far away lies the lowland; and every breeze of heaven sweeps over the crests of the hills.  So one peculiarly tall palm was chosen for a central landmark, an ornament to the town square such as no capital in Europe can boast.  Traces were cut, streets laid out, lots of Crown lands put up for sale, and settlers invited in the name of the Government.

Scarcely eighteen months had passed since then, and already there Mitchell Street, Violin Street, Duboulay Street, Farfan Street, had each its new houses built of cedar and thatched with palm.  Two Chinese shops had Celestials with pigtails and thick-soled shoes grinning behind cedar counters, among stores of Bryant’s safety matches, Huntley and Palmers’ biscuits, and Allsopp’s pale ale.  A church had been built, the shell at least, and partly floored, with a very simple, but not tasteless, altar; the Abbe had a good house, with a gallery, jalousies, and white china handles to the doors.  The mighty palm in the centre of Gordon Square had a neat railing round it, as befitted the Palladium of the village.  Behind the houses, among the stumps of huge trees, maize and cassava, pigeon-peas and sweet potatoes, fattened in the sun, on ground which till then had been shrouded by vegetation a hundred feet thick; and as we sat at the head man’s house, with French and English prints upon the walls, and drank beer from a Chinese shop, and looked out upon the loyal, thriving little settlement, I envied the two young men who could say, ’At least, we have not lived in vain; for we have made this out of the primeval forest.’  Then on again.  ‘We mounted’ (I quote now from the notes of one to whom the existence of the settlement was due) ’to the crest of the hills, and had a noble view southwards, looking over the rich mass of dark wood, flecked here and there with a scarlet stain of Bois Immortelle, to the great sea of bright green sugar cultivation in the Naparimas, studded by white works and villages, and backed far off by a hazy line of