Another specimen of Negro character I was to have analysed, or tried to analyse, at the estate where I had slept.  M. F—–­ had lately caught a black servant at the brook-side busily washing something in a calabash, and asked him what was he doing there?  The conversation would have been held, of course, in French-Spanish-African—­Creole patois, a language which is becoming fixed, with its own grammar and declensions, etc.  A curious book on it has lately been published in Trinidad by Mr. Thomas, a coloured gentleman, who seems to be at once no mean philologer and no mean humorist.  The substance of the Negro’s answer was, ’Why, sir, you sent me to the town to buy a packet of sugar and a packet of salt; and coming back it rained so hard, the packets burst, and the salt was all washed into the sugar.  And so—­I am washing it out again.’ . . .

This worthy was to have been brought to me, that I might discover, if possible, by what processes of ’that which he was pleased to call his mind’ he had arrived at the conclusion that such a thing could be done.  Clearly, he could not plead unavoidable ignorance of the subject-matter, as might the old cook at San Josef, who, the first time her master brought home Wenham Lake ice from Port of Spain, was scandalised at the dirtiness of the ‘American water,’ washed off the sawdust, and dried the ice in the sun.  His was a case of Handy-Andyism, as that intellectual disease may be named, after Mr. Lover’s hero; like that of the Obeah-woman, when she tried to bribe the white gentleman with half a dozen of bottled beer; a case of muddle-headed craft and elaborate silliness, which keeps no proportion between the means and the end; so common in insane persons; frequent, too, among the lower Irish, such as Handy Andy; and very frequent, I am afraid, among the Negroes.  But—­as might have been expected—­the poor boy’s moral sense had proved as shaky as his intellectual powers.  He had just taken a fancy to some goods of his master’s; and had retreated, to enjoy them the more securely, into the southern forests, with a couple of brown policemen on his track.  So he was likely to undergo a more simple investigation than that which was submitted to my analysis, viz. how he proposed to wash the salt out of the sugar.

We arrived after a while at Valencia, a scattered hamlet in the woods, with a good shop or ‘store’ upon a village green, under the verandah whereof lay, side by side with bottled ale and biscuit tins, bags of Carapo {265} nuts; trapezoidal brown nuts—­enclosed originally in a round fruit—­which ought some day to form a valuable article of export.  Their bitter anthelminthic oil is said to have medicinal uses; but it will be still more useful for machinery, as it has—­like that curious flat gourd the Sequa {266a}—­the property of keeping iron from rust.  The tree itself, common here and in Guiana, is one of the true Forest Giants;