The lower gallery was paved with small diamond-shaped slabs of blue and white marble, the very look of which added to the coolness. "Why, Mr Hudson, how glorious! nothing superior to this even in ould Ireland."
The American laughed, and nodded in the direction of his daughter. I turned my eye in the same direction, and met hers. She had apparently been observing how I was affected, at least so my vanity whispered: she blushed slightly, and looked another way.
I saw I must say something. "Indeed, Miss Hudson, I thought you had not been above two months in the island. Did you not come down in the American frigate"——
She smiled.
"I did, Mr Brail; but it was the cruise before last—we have been six months here."
"Six months! and are all these glorious plants the growth of six months?"
"Ay, that they are," quoth Listado; "most of them have not been planted more than six weeks."
The inside of this large mansion was laid out more for comfort than show; the rooms, that all opened into the corridors already mentioned, were large and airy, but, with the exception of a tolerable dining-room, drawing-room, and the apartments of the ladies, very indifferently furnished. They were lit from without by the usual heavy wooden unglazed balconies, common both in New and Old Spain, which appear to have been invented more for the purpose of excluding the heat than admitting the light.
In front of the house, and on each side, were large white terraced platforms, with shallow stone ledges, built in flights, like gigantic stairs on the hillside. On this the coffee was thickly strewed in the red husk, or pulp, as it is called, to dry in the sun. Little Dicky took the berries to be cherries, until the pulp stuck in his little teeth.
The opposite hill had been cleared, and was covered with coffee-bushes; and right below us, in the bottom of the deep ravine, a tree-screened rivulet murmured and brawled alternately over a rugged bed of limestone rock, as the breeze rose and fell.