midst of great valleys of wondrous beauty. Or in the morning you can gaze through the damp mountain mist and see the yellow sun rising softly from amidst the forest of palm-trees. You can listen to the full-throated song of birds thanking God for the beauty of life, or see lizards all green and gold, playing along the boughs of giant forest trees. It is a good place, but somehow it lacks the airy-fairy lightness of the hot plains. The natives do not laugh so much, and they are more European in their dress and manners. There are white invalids in the place and you cannot forget that it is a sanatorium.
Belle Vue is rather better and more picturesque and not so good. These contradictions are permissable when one is writing of Jamaica. Belle Vue is better because it is less civilised and less damp. It is more picturesque because the only white man’s bungalow was built more than a hundred years ago, and because the natives are less intimately associated with the white people. It is not so good because it is not so beautiful.
Still the view there from the edge of the mountain shelf, which comprises the settlement, gives you a picture of Kingston and eight miles of its northern suburbs, and beyond Kingston the wonderful bay, Port Royal, the palisadoes and the ships at anchor and by the wharf side. This view is compensation for the fatigues of the journey upwards. The house too, the white man’s bungalow, is unique and full of history. People say that it is older than two centuries, and its appearance gives colour to the report. Heavy, arched doorways, great high rooms, solid fittings and small windows. The woodwork is hand-carved and very beautiful; the outbuildings are flimsy and very decrepid. Behind the bungalow is a farmyard built on the model of those to be found in England. There is a large water pool for the cattle, and an extensive yard for the convenience of the farm hands. Here we can see the dairy-work and watch the poultry strutting about in search of toothsome morsels. An occasional dog lies gasping in the sun, and now and then a little pig thrusts his nose into the gateway and gazes longingly at the place so cruelly denied him. The un-English parts are the sheds devoted to coffee-cooking and the place for the storing of cocoa and cinchona.
About the yard, among the coffee and cinchona huts, the cattle stand listlessly gazing earthward, and the mountain goats flick their tails in endless endeavour to disturb offending insects. It is rural—Arcadian in its simplicity and great beauty. The bungalow and farmyard are surrounded by a forest of pimento—an all-spice whose foliage is more fragrant than the spice which makes the cultivation prosperous. Some day, when Jamaicans awaken to the significance of the richness of their island, some one will distil the perfume from the pimento leaf, and in England we shall be able smell the wild fragrance of a Jamaican forest. Where the forests end the banana plantations commence, and dotted about the fields we find the native settlements.
Native settlements are all unique; they are all strange villages erected according to an architecture
