“Thank you—certainly.”
It was by this time grey dawn. My window had been left open the evening before, when it was hot and sultry enough, but it was now cold and damp, and a wetting mist boiled in through the open sash, like rolling wreaths of white smoke.
“What is that—where are we in the North Sea, or on the top of Mont Blanc? Why, clouds may be all in your way, Massa Jupiter, but....”
“Cloud!” rejoined the Deity—“him no more den marning fag, massa; always hab him over de Vale in de morning, until de sun melt him. And where is you?—why, you is in Massa Aaron house, here in St Thomas in de Vale—and Miss.”
“Miss”—said I—“what Miss?”
“Oh, for you Miss,” rejoined Jupiter with a grin, “Miss Mary up and dress already, and de horses are at de door; him wait for you to ride wid him before breakfast, massa, and to see de clearing of de fag.”
“Ride before breakfast!—see the clearing of the fog!” grumbled I. “Romantic it may be, but consumedly inconvenient.” However, my knighthood was at stake; so up I got, drank my coffee, dressed, and adjourned to the piazza, where my adorable was all ready rigged with riding-habit and whip; straightway we mounted, she into her side saddle with her riding-habit, and who knows how many petticoats beneath her, while I, Pilgarlic, embarked in thin jean trowsers upon a cold, damp, indeed wet, saddle, that made me shiver again. But I was understood to be in love; ergo, I was expected to be agreeable. However, a damp saddle and a thin pair of trowsers allays one’s ardour a good deal too. But if any one had seen the impervious fog in which we sat—why, you could not see a tree three yards from you—a cabbage looked like a laurel bush, and Sneezer became a dromedary, and the negroes passing the little gate to their work were absolute Titans. Boom, a long reverberating noise thundered in the distance, and amongst the hills, gradually dying away in a hollow rumble. “The admiral tumbling down the hatchway, Tom—the morning gun fired at Port Royal,” said Mary; and so it was.
The fire-flies were still glancing amongst the leaves of the beautiful orange-trees in front of the house; but we could see no farther, the whole view being shrouded under the thick watery veil which rolled and boiled about us, sometimes thick, and sometimes thinner; hovering between a mist and small rain, and wetting ones hair, and face, and clothes, most completely. We descended from the eminence on which the house stood, rode along the level at the foot of it, and, after a canter of a couple of miles, we began to ascend a bridle-path, through the Guinea-grass pastures, which rose rank and soaking wet, as high as one’s saddlebow, drenching me to the skin, in the few patches where I was not wet before. All this while the fog continued as thick as ever; at length we suddenly rose above it—rode out of it, as it were.
St Thomas in the Vale is, as the name denotes, a deep valley, about ten miles long by six broad, into which there is but one inlet comfortably passable for carriages—the road along which we had come. The hills, by which it is surrounded on all sides, are, for the most part, covered with Guinea—grass pastures on the lower ranges, and with coffee plantations and provision grounds higher up. When we had ridden clear of the mist, the sun was shining brightly overhead, and every thing was fresh and sparkling with dewdrops near us; but the vale was still concealed under the wool-like sea of white mist, only pierced here and there by a tall cocoa—nut tree rising above it, like the mast of a foundered vessel. But anon the higher ridges of the grass pieces appeared, as the fog undulated in fleecy waves in the passing breeze, which, as it rose and sank like the swell of the ocean, disclosed every now and then the works on some high-lying sugar estate, and again rolled over them like the tide covering the shallows of the sea, while shouts of laughter, and the whooping of the negroes in the fields, rose from out the obscurity, blended with the signal cries of the sugar boilers to the stockholemen of “Fire, fire grand copper, grand copper,” and the ca cawing, like so many rooks, of the children driving the mules and oxen in the mills, and the everlasting splashing and panting of the water-wheel of the estate immediately below us, and the crashing and smashing of the canes, as they were crushed between the mill rollers; and the cracking of the wain and waggonmen’s long whips, and the rumbling, and creaking, and squealing of the machinery of the mills, and of the carriage-wheels; while the smoke from the unseen chimney stalks of the sugar-works rose whirling darkly up through the watery veil, like spinning waterspouts, from out the bosom of the great deep. Anon the veil rose, and we were once more gradually enveloped in clouds. Presently the thickest of the mist floated up, and rose above us like a gauze-like canopy of fleecy clouds overhanging the whole level plain, through which the red quenched sun, which a moment before was flaming with intolerable brightness overhead, suddenly assumed the appearance of a round red globe in an apothecary’s window, surrounded by a broad yellow sickly halo, which dimly lit up, as if the sun had been in eclipse, the cane-fields, then in arrow, as it is called, (a lavender coloured flower, about three feet long, that shoots out from the top of the cane, denoting that it is mature, and fit to be ground,) and the Guinea-grass plats, and the nice-looking houses of the bushas, and the busy mill-yards, and the noisy gangs of negroes in the field, which were all disclosed, as if by the change of a scene.
At length, in love as we were, we remembered our breakfast; and beginning to descend, we encountered in the path a gang of about three dozen little glossy black piccaninies going to their work, the oldest not above twelve years of age, under the care of an old negress. They had all their little packies, or calabashes, on their heads, full of provisions; while an old cook, with a bundle of fagots on her head, and a fire stick in her hand, brought up the rear, her province being to cook the food which the tiny little work-people carried. Presently one or two book-keepers, or deputy white superintendents on the plantation, also passed,—strong healthy looking young fellows, in stuff jackets and white trowsers, and all with good cudgels in their hands. The mist, which had continued to rise up and up, growing thinner and thinner as it ascended, now rent overhead about the middle of the vale, and the masses, like scattered clouds, drew towards the ledge of the hills that surrounded it, like floating chips of wood in a tub of water, sailing in long shreds towards @he most precipitous peaks, to which as they ascended they attached themselves, and remained at rest. And now the fierce sun, reasserting his supremacy, shone once more in all his tropical fierceness right down on the steamy earth, and all was glare, and heat, and bustle.