women hounded him up the tree.  He obeyed in meek resignation, and in a couple of minutes we had more oranges than we could eat.  And such oranges:  golden-green, but rather more green than gold, which cannot be (as at home) bitten or sucked; for so strong is the fragrant essential oil in the skin, that it would blister the lips and disorder the stomach; and the orange must be carefully stripped of the outer coat before you attack a pulp compared with which, for flavour, the orange of our shops is but bad sugar and water.

As I tethered my horse to a cacao-stem, and sat on a log among hothouse ferns, peeling oranges with a bowie-knife beneath the burning mid-day sun, the quaintest fancy came over me that it was all a dream, a phantasmagoria, a Christmas pantomime got up by my host for my special amusement; and that if I only winked my eyes hard enough, when I opened them again it would be all gone, and I should find myself walking with him on Ascot Heath, while the snow whirled over the heather, and the black fir-trees groaned in the north-east wind.

We soon rode on, with blessings on fair Candelaria and her stately mother, while the noise of the surf grew louder and louder in front of us.  We took (if I remember right) a sudden turn to the left, to get our horses to the shore.  Our pedestrians held straight on; there was a Mangrove swamp and a lagoon in front, for which they, bold lads, cared nothing.

We passed over a sort of open down, from which all vegetation had been cleared, save the Palmistes—­such a wood of them as I had never seen before.  A hundred or more, averaging at least a hundred feet in height, stood motionless in the full cut of the strong trade-wind.  One would have expected them, when the wood round was felled, to feel the sudden nakedness.  One would have expected the inrush of salt air and foam to have injured their foliage.  But, seemingly, it was not so.  They stood utterly unharmed; save some half-dozen who had had their tops snapped off by a gale—­there are no hurricanes in Trinidad—­and remained as enormous unmeaning pikes, or posts, fifty to eighty feet high, transformed, by that one blast, from one of the loveliest to one of the ugliest natural objects.

Through the Palmiste pillars; through the usual black Roseau scrub; then under tangled boughs down a steep stony bank; and we were on a long beach of deep sand and quartz gravel.  On our right the Shore-grapes with their green bunches of fruit, the Mahauts {226} with their poplar-like leaves and great yellow flowers, and the ubiquitous Matapalos, fringed the shore.  On our left weltered a broad waste of plunging foam; in front green mountains were piled on mountains, blazing in sunlight, yet softened and shrouded by an air saturated with steam and salt.  We waded our horses over the mouth of the little Yarra, which hurried down through the sand, brown and foul from the lagoon above.  We sat down on bare polished