But our eyes were drawn off, at almost the second glance, from mountain-peaks and glens to the slopes of cultivated lowland, sheeted with bright green cane, and guinea-grass, and pigeon pea; and that not for their own sakes, but for the sake of objects so utterly unlike anything which we had ever seen, that it was not easy, at first, to discover what they were.  Gray pillars, which seemed taller than the tallest poplars, smooth and cylindrical as those of a Doric temple, each carrying a flat head of darkest green, were ranged along roadsides and round fields, or stood, in groups or singly, near engine-works, or towered above rich shrubberies which shrouded comfortable country-houses.  It was not easy, as I have said, to believe that these strange and noble things were trees:  but such they were.  At last we beheld, with wonder and delight, the pride of the West Indies, the Cabbage Palms—­Palmistes of the French settlers—­which botanists have well named Oreodoxa, the ’glory of the mountains.’  We saw them afterwards a hundred times in their own native forests; and when they rose through tangled masses of richest vegetation, mixed with other and smaller species of palms, their form, fantastic though it was, harmonised well with hundreds of forms equally fantastic.  But here they seemed, at first sight, out of place, incongruous, and artificial, standing amid no kindred forms, and towering over a cultivation and civilisation which might have been mistaken, seen from the sea, for wealthy farms along some English shore.  Gladly would we have gone on shore, were it but to have stood awhile under those Palmistes; and an invitation was not wanting to a pretty tree-shrouded house on a low cliff a mile off, where doubtless every courtesy and many a luxury would have awaited us.  But it could not be.  We watched kind folk rowed to shore without us; and then turned to watch the black flotilla under our quarter.

The first thing that caught our eye on board the negro boats which were alongside was, of course, the baskets of fruits and vegetables, of which one of us at least had been hearing all his life.  At St. Thomas’s we had been introduced to bananas (figs, as they are miscalled in the West Indies); to the great green oranges, thick-skinned and fragrant; to those junks of sugar-cane, some two feet long, which Cuffy and Cuffy’s ladies delight to gnaw, walking, sitting, and standing; increasing thereby the size of their lips, and breaking out, often enough, their upper front teeth.  We had seen, and eaten too, the sweet sop {25a}—­a passable fruit, or rather congeries of fruits, looking like a green and purple strawberry, of the bigness of an orange.  It is the cousin of the prickly sour-sop; {25b} of the really delicious, but to me unknown, Chirimoya; {25c} and of the custard apple, {25d} containing a pulp which (as those who remember the delectable pages of Tom Cringle know) bears a startling likeness to brains.