if we had tried, we should probably not have been allowed to see.  The Negro is chary of admitting white men to his amusements; and no wonder.  If a London ballroom were suddenly invaded by Phoebus, Ares, and Hermes, such as Homer drew them, they would probably be unwelcome guests; at least in the eyes of the gentlemen.  The latter would, I suspect, thoroughly sympathise with the Negro in the old story, intelligible enough to those who know what is the favourite food of a West Indian chicken.

‘Well, John, so they gave a dignity ball on the estate last night?’

‘Yes, massa, very nice ball.  Plenty of pretty ladies, massa.’

’Why did you not ask me, John?  I like to look at pretty ladies as well as you.’

‘Ah, massa:  when cockroach give a ball, him no ask da fowls.’

Great and worthy exertions are made, every London Season, for the conversion of the Negro and the Heathen, and the abolition of their barbarous customs and dances.  It is to be hoped that the Negro and the Heathen will some day show their gratitude to us, by sending missionaries hither to convert the London Season itself, dances and all; and assist it to take the beam out of its own eye, in return for having taken the mote out of theirs.

CHAPTER XVI:  A PROVISION GROUND

The ‘provision grounds’ of the Negroes were very interesting.  I had longed to behold, alive and growing, fruits and plants which I had heard so often named, and seen so often figured, that I had expected to recognise many of them at first sight; and found, in nine cases out of ten, that I could not.  Again, I had longed to gather some hints as to the possibility of carrying out in the West Indian islands that system of ’Petite Culture’—­of small spade farming—­ which I have long regarded, with Mr. John Stuart Mill and others, as not only the ideal form of agriculture, but perhaps the basis of any ideal rustic civilisation.  And what scanty and imperfect facts I could collect I set down here.

It was a pleasant sensation to have, day after day, old names translated for me into new facts.  Pleasant, at least to me:  not so pleasant, I fear, to my kind companions, whose courtesy I taxed to the uttermost by stopping to look over every fence, and ask, ’What is that?  And that?’ Let the reader who has a taste for the beautiful as well as the useful in horticulture, do the same, and look in fancy over the hedge of the nearest provision ground.

There are orange-trees laden with fruit:  who knows not them? and that awkward-boughed tree, with huge green fruit, and deeply-cut leaves a foot or more across—­leaves so grand that, as one of our party often suggested, their form ought to be introduced into architectural ornamentation, and to take the place of the Greek acanthus, which they surpass in beauty—­that is, of course, a Bread-fruit tree.