however, purchase freedom from the lowland heats at the expense of being a large part of the time enveloped in chilling fogs.  Here the properly tropical productions cease to thrive, and melancholy caricatures of northern vegetables and fruits take their place.  You see in the Kingston market diminutive and watery potatoes and apples, that have come down from the clouds, and on St. Catherine’s Peak I once picked a few strawberries, which had about as much savor as so many chips.  The noble forest trees of the lower mountains, as you go up, give way to an exuberant but spongy growth of tree-ferns and bushes.  Great herds of wild swine, descended from those introduced by the Spaniards, roam these secluded thickets, and once furnished subsistence to the runaway negroes who, under the name of Maroons, for several generations annoyed and terrified the island.

In these high mountains the sense of deep solitude is at once heightened and softened by the flute-like notes of the solitaire.  I shall never forget the impression produced by first hearing this.  It was on the top of St. Catherine’s Peak, fifty-two hundred feet above the sea, in the early morning, when the mountain solitude seemed most profound, that my companion and I heard from the adjacent woods its mysterious note.  It was a soft and clear tone, somewhat prolonged, and ending in a modulation which imparted to it an indescribable effect, as if of supernal melancholy.  It seemed almost as if some mild angel were lingering pensively upon the mountain tops, before pursuing his downward flight among the unhappy sons of men.

The uplands of the island, from 800 to 1,500 feet above the sea, are a cheerful, sunny region, in which the tropical heat is tempered by almost constant refreshing breezes, and, in the eastern part at least, by abundant showers.  Some of the western parishes not unfrequently suffer terribly from drought.  There are two or three which have not even a spring, depending wholly upon rain water collected in tanks.  These sometimes become dry, causing unutterable distress both to man and beast.  We hear even sometimes of poor people starving during these seasons of drought.  But our more favored region in the east scarcely knows dearth.  Our mighty mountain neighbors seldom permitted us even to fear it, and were more apt to send us a deluge than a drought.

In the uplands our winter temperature was commonly about 75 deg. in the shade at noon, and the summer temperature about ten degrees higher.  The nights are almost always agreeably cool, and frequent showers and breezes allay the sultriness of the days.  I never saw the thermometer above 90 deg. in the shade, and seldom below 65 deg..  It once fell to 54 deg., to the lamentable discomfort of our feelings and fingers.  Of course, where the sun for months is nearly vertical, and twice in the summer actually so, the heat of his direct beams is intense.  But those careful precautions of avoiding travelling in the middle of the day, on which some lay such stress, we never concerned ourselves with in Jamaica, and I could not discover that we were ever the worse for it.  An umbrella was enough to stand between us and mischief.