My thoughts fly back to our Northern woods. I see the sinuously graceful elms, with the sunlight streaming through their wide open branches upon an earth longing for warmth; and long shafts of white noonday shooting through the interstices of basswood, maple, and ash; the woods are not black and sunless; they are translucently green, quivering with light and needed warmth. But here, where the sun is a ball of redundant flame the year around, Nature bequeaths to her children a shaded forest, rigidly trunked, stolidly formed, thick-leafed, which no blazing sun can penetrate or sweeping hurricane desolate.
IV.
Quite as one strokes the head of a favourite animal, Manuel leads us to an insignificant-looking tree, takes a branch caressingly in his hand, brings out his clumsy knife, selects just the right spot, cuts off a bit, and hands us a piece of camphor wood.
Into the dear St. Thomas basket it goes, with the leaves of coffee, the pink and white clove blossoms, and a long spray of araucaria from the Norfolk Islands,—a strange company, indeed!
Yonder long yellow avenues are cinnamon and spice groves with reddish-yellow bark, smooth as wax, casting slender shadows in the golden light. Here is the shaddock, entirely weaned from its Malayan home, and farther on a clump of low bushes, in among the nutmeg trees and coffee, with small satin-like leaf, brings us to the herb that “cheers but does not inebriate,”—the tea.
Just see those glorious great lemons, glowing in the ever-splendid sunlight, which transmits to every living object a radiance, a dazzling brilliancy, in which life progresses and finally dissolves out of sheer exhaustion from the exuberance of vitality.
Oh, to our starved eyes of the North; to our senses benumbed by dreary days of darkened sky, hearts chilled by bitterness of wind and gray, unyielding frost, this never-ending, unspeakable sunlight, filtering through the yellow vistas of clove and cinnamon, comes like the actual presence of Apollo, the Shining One! We may, in unguarded moments, in ungrateful moments, maybe, consider his embrace too positive, and we may raise the white umbrella, but we never quite lose our rejuvenated love for his golden glory.
Manuel, but half-clad, looks as if he would dismember at any moment. His trousers are hitched by a couple of old leathers, and his shirt looks as if it wished it “didn’t have to,” and his old hat is only there on sufferance, and his shoes—old flippety-flops—have dragged their ill-shaped existence through many a weary mile. But Manuel doesn’t care; he loves his garden, and the sunshine and the luscious fruit, all his children so well behaved and so obedient to his voice. He takes a bamboo pole and gives one of the big, juicy lemons a rap, and down it falls on Wee One’s head with such a thump! Then Manuel is very sorry, and he apologises for his child’s misdemeanour in his funny, mixed-up Portuguese-English-Spanish and the rest, and we understand and don’t mind a bit; in fact, we wouldn’t care if more would fall in the same way.
Once upon a time, in the far-off golden days, when the Divine in Creation had not been quite forgot, there came to this shore a band of men,—not faultless, no, not faultless—but great men “for a’ that,” who, with glittering cross aloft, christened this fair land after the blessed Trinity. But this was not her first sacrament. Deep in the eternal silence of the forest, the dweller in the High Wood had sought expression of the divine through beauty, and chose a name from out the radiant wilderness which would tell for ever of its wonderment: “Iere,” the land of the humming-bird, they called her—those dusky children of the High Wood—and to this day she clings lovingly to her maiden name.
We look about us. Where are the birds once peopling these forests, like myriads of rainbows? Oh, sisters! members of Humane Societies! Hunt up your old bonnets and see the poor little stuffed carcasses ornamenting your cast-off finery! So Trinidad has been bereft of her wonderful birds, and now there is but a name, a sad-sounding, meaningless name—Iere—to tell of days which knew not the pride and cruelty of women.