were the poison that did the mischief.  But the reports have probably some foundation in truth.  An oppressed race, seldom daring to strike openly, would be very apt to devise subtle ways of vengeance.  It will be remembered that one of the most frequent items in our own Southern newspapers used to be accounts of attempts made by slave girls to poison their masters’ families.  Arsenic, which they commonly used, is a clumsy means, almost sure to be detected; but in the West Indies, where the proportion of native Africans was always very large, the African sorcerers, the dreaded Obi-men, who exercise so baleful a power over the imaginations of the blacks, appear also to have availed themselves of other than imaginary charms to keep up their credit as the disposers of life and death, and to have often gained such a knowledge of slow vegetable poisons as made them formidable helpers of revenge, whether against their own race or against the race of their oppressors.  In a recent Jamaica story of Captain Mayne Reid’s, the plot centres in the hideous figure of an old Obi-man, who wreaks his revenge for former wrongs in this secret way, destroying victim after victim from among the lords of the soil.  The piece is stocked with horrors enough for the most ravenous devourer of yellow-covered literature, but nevertheless it is so true to the conditions of life in the old days of Jamaica, that it is well worth reading for a lively sense of the time when the fearful influences of savage heathenism, slavery, and tropical passion were working together in that land of rarest beauty and of foulest sin.  Evil enough remains, but, thank God, the hideous shadows of the past have fled away forever.

But these tragical remembrances and suspicions belong rather to the plains, into which we are about to descend.  Here we feel distinctly that we are in the tropics.  The sweltering heat, tempered, indeed, by the land and sea breezes, but still sufficiently oppressive, and almost the same day and night, leaves no doubt of this fact.  Vegetation, too, appears more distinctly tropical.  The character of the landscape in the two regions is quite different.  In the uplands the wealth of glowing green swallows up peculiarities of form, and presents little difference of color except the endless diversity of its own shades.  There are, however, some distinct features of the landscape.  Conspicuous on every hillside are the groves ‘where the mango apples grow,’ their mass of dense rounded foliage looking not unlike our maples, and giving a pleasant sense of home to the northern sojourner.  The feathery bamboo, most gigantic of grasses, runs in plumy lines across the country.  Around the negro cottages, here and there, rise groups of the cocoanut palms, giving, more than anything else, a tropical character to the landscape.  On a distant eminence may perhaps be seen a lofty ceiba or cotton tree, its white trunk rising sixty or seventy feet from the ground without a limb, and then putting out