forest, out of which rose the peaks of the Moruga Mountains.  More to the west lay San Fernando hill, the calm gulf, and the coast toward La Brea and Cedros melting into mist.  M—–­ thought we should get a better view of the northern mountains by riding up to old Nicano’s house; so we went thither, under the cacao rich with yellow and purple pods.  The view was fine:  but the northern range, though visible, was rather too indistinct, and the mainland was not to be seen at all.’

Nevertheless, the panorama from the top of Montserrat is at once the most vast, and the most lovely, which I have ever seen.  And whosoever chooses to go and live there may buy any reasonable quantity of the richest soil at 1 pounds per acre.

Then down off the ridge, toward the northern lowland, lay a headlong old Indian path, by which we travelled, at last, across a rocky brook, and into a fresh paradise.

I must be excused for using this word so often:  but I use it in the original Persian sense, as a place in which natural beauty has been helped by art.  An English park or garden would have been called of old a paradise; and the enceinte of a West Indian house, even in its present half-wild condition, well deserves the same title.  That Art can help Nature there can be no doubt.  ‘The perfection of Nature’ exists only in the minds of sentimentalists, and of certain well-meaning persons, who assert the perfection of Nature when they wish to controvert science, and deny it when they wish to prove this earth fallen and accursed.  Mr. Nesfield can make landscapes, by obedience to certain laws which Nature is apt to disregard in the struggle for existence, more beautiful than they are already by Nature; and that without introducing foreign forms of vegetation.  But if foreign forms, wisely chosen for their shapes and colours, be added, the beauty may be indefinitely increased.  For the plants most capable of beautifying any given spot do not always grow therein, simply because they have not yet arrived there; as may be seen by comparing any wood planted with Rhododendrons and Azaleas with the neighbouring wood in its native state.  Thus may be obtained somewhat of that variety and richness which is wanting everywhere, more or less, in the vegetation of our northern zone, only just recovering slowly from the destructive catastrophe of the glacial epoch; a richness which, small as it is, vanishes as we travel northward, till the drear landscape is sheeted more and more with monotonous multitudes of heather, grass, fir, or other social plants.