And so I end my little episode about these Lecythids, only adding that the reader must not confound with their nuts the butter-nuts, Caryocar, or Souari, which may be bought, I believe, at Fortnum and Mason’s, and which are of all nuts the largest and the most delicious.  They have not been found as yet in Trinidad, though they abound in Guiana.  They are the fruit also of an enormous tree {230}—­there is a young one fruiting finely in the Botanic Garden at Port of Spain—­of a quite different order; a cousin of the Matapalos and of the Soap-berries.  It carries large threefold leaves on pointed stalks; spikes of flowers with innumerable stamens; and here and there a fruit something like the cannon-ball, though not quite as large.  On breaking the soft rind you find it full of white meal, probably eatable, and in the meal three or four great hard wrinkled nuts, rounded on one side, wedge-shaped on the other, which, cracked, are found full of almond-like white jelly, so delicious that one can well believe travellers when they tell us that the Indian tribes wage war against each other for the possession of the trees which bear these precious vagaries of bounteous nature.

And now we began to near the village, two scattered rows of clay and timber bowers right and left of the trace, each half buried in fruit-trees and vegetables, and fenced in with hedges of scarlet Hibiscus; the wooded mountains shading them to the south, the sea thundering behind them to the north.  As we came up we heard a bell, and soon were aware of a brown mob running, with somewhat mysterious in the midst.  Was it the Host? or a funeral? or a fight?  Soon the mob came up with profound salutations, and smiles of self-satisfaction, evidently thinking that they had done a fine thing; and disclosed, hanging on a long bamboo, their one church-bell.  Their old church (a clay and timber thing of their own handiwork) had become ruinous; and they dared not leave their bell aloft in it.  But now they were going to build themselves a new and larger church, Government giving them the site; and the bell, being on furlough, was put into requisition to ring in His Excellency the Governor and his muddy and quaintly attired—­or unattired—­suite.

Ah, that I could have given a detailed picture of the scene before the police court-house—­the coloured folk, of all hues of skin, all types of feature, and all gay colours of dress, crowding round, the tall stately brown policeman, Thompson, called forward and receiving with a military salute the Governor’s commendations for having saved, at the risk of his life, some shipwrecked folk out of the surf close by; and the flash of his eye when he heard that he was to receive the Humane Society’s medal from England, and to have his name mentioned, probably to the Queen herself; the greetings, too, of almost filial respect which were bestowed by the coloured people on one who, though still young, had