but this one is twenty feet high; and next to it is that strange tree the Clavija, of which the Creoles are justly fond.  A single straight stem, fifteen feet high, carries huge oblong-leaves atop, and beneath them, growing out of the stem itself, delicate panicles of little white flowers, fragrant exceedingly.  A double blue pea {74} and a purple Bignonia are scrambling over shrubs and walls.  And what is this which hangs over into the road, some fifteen feet in height—­long, bare, curving sticks, carrying each at its end a flat blaze of scarlet?  What but the Poinsettia, paltry scions of which, like the Dracaena, adorn our hothouses and dinner-tables.  The street is on fire with it all the way up, now in mid-winter; while at the street end opens out a green park, fringed with noble trees all in full leaf; underneath them more pleasant little suburban villas; and behind all, again, a background of steep wooded mountain a thousand feet in height.  That is the Savannah, the public park and race-ground; such as neither London nor Paris can boast.

One may be allowed to regret that the exuberant loyalty of the citizens of Port of Spain has somewhat defaced one end at least of their Savannah; for in expectation of a visit from the Duke of Edinburgh, they erected for his reception a pile of brick, of which the best that can be said is that it holds a really large and stately ballroom, and the best that can be hoped is that the authorities will hide it as quickly as possible with a ring of Palmistes, Casuarinas, Sandboxes, and every quick-growing tree.  Meanwhile, as His Royal Highness did not come the citizens wisely thought that they might as well enjoy their new building themselves.  So there, on set high days, the Governor and the Lady of the Governor hold their court.  There, when the squadron comes in, officers in uniform dance at desperate sailors’ pace with delicate Creoles; some of them, coloured as well as white, so beautiful in face and figure that one could almost pardon the jolly tars if they enacted a second Mutiny of the Bounty, and refused one and all to leave the island and the fair dames thereof.  And all the while the warm night wind rushes in through the high open windows; and the fireflies flicker up and down, in and out, and you slip away on to the balcony to enjoy—­for after all it is very hot—­the purple star-spangled night; and see aloft the saw of the mountain ridges against the black-blue sky; and below—­what a contrast!—­the crowd of white eyeballs and white teeth—­Negroes, Coolies, Chinese—­all grinning and peeping upward against the railing, in the hope of seeing—­ through the walls—­the ‘buccra quality’ enjoy themselves.