The branching broad-leaved canes, with strange white flowers, is Arrowroot. {313d} The tall mallow-like shrub, with large pale yellowish-white flowers, Cotton.  The huge grass with beads on it {313e} is covered with the Job’s tears, which are precious in children’s eyes, and will be used as beads for necklaces.  The castor-oil plants, and the maize—­that last always beautiful—­are of course well known.  The arrow leaves, three feet long, on stalks three feet high, like gigantic Arums, are Tanias, {313f} whose roots are excellent.  The plot of creeping convolvulus-like plants, with purple flowers, is the Sweet, or true, Potato. {313g}

And we must not overlook the French Physic-nut, {313h} with its hemp like leaves, and a little bunch of red coral in the midst, with which the Negro loves to adorn his garden, and uses it also as medicine; or the Indian Shot, {313i} which may be seen planted out now in summer gardens in England.  The Negro grows it, not for its pretty crimson flowers, but because its hard seed put into a bladder furnishes him with that detestable musical instrument the chac-chac, wherewith he accompanies nightly that equally detestable instrument the tom-tom.

The list of vegetables is already long:  but there are a few more to be added to it.  For there, in a corner, creep some plants of the Earth-nut, {314a} a little vetch which buries its pods in the earth.  The owner will roast and eat their oily seeds.  There is also a tall bunch of Ochro {314b}—­a purple-stemmed mallow-flowered plant—­whose mucilaginous seeds will thicken his soup.  Up a tree, and round the house-eaves, scramble a large coarse Pumpkin, and a more delicate Granadilla, {314c} whose large yellow fruits hang ready to be plucked, and eaten principally for a few seeds of the shape and colour of young cockroaches.  If he be a prudent man (especially if he lives in Jamaica), he will have a plant of the pretty Overlook pea, {314d} trailing aloft somewhere, to prevent his garden being ‘overlooked,’ i.e. bewitched by an evil eye, in case the Obeah-bottle which hangs from the Mango-tree, charged with toad and spider, dirty water, and so forth, has no terrors for his secret enemy.  He will have a Libidibi {314e} tree, too, for astringent medicine; and his hedge will be composed, if he be a man of taste—­ as he often seems to be—­of Hibiscus bushes, whose magnificent crimson flowers contrast with the bright yellow bunches of the common Cassia, and the scarlet flowers of the Jumby-bead bush, {314f} and blue and white and pink Convolvuluses.  The sulphur and purple Neerembergia of our hothouses, which is here one mass of flower at Christmas, and the creeping Crab’s-eye Vine, {314g} will scramble over the fence; while, as a finish to his little Paradise, he will have planted at each of its four corners an upright Dragon’s-blood {314h} bush, whose violet and red leaves bedeck our dinner-tables in winter; and are here used, from their unlikeness to any other plant in the island, to mark boundaries.