A CACAO-CLEARING. 63 



colony, the man to work five days a week on sugar estates, 

 the family to grow provisions for the market, instead of 

 being shipped back to India at a cost, including gratuities 

 and etceteras, of not less than 50/. 



One clearing we reached were I five-and-twenty, I should 

 like to make just such another next to it of a higher class 

 still. A cultivated Scotchman, now no longer young, but 

 hale and mighty, had taken up three hundred acres, and 

 already cleared a hundred and fifty ; and there he intended to 

 pass the rest of a busy life, not under his own vine and 

 fig-tree, but under his own castor-oil and cacao-tree. We 

 were welcomed by as noble a Scot's face as I ever saw, 

 and as keen a Scot's eye ; and taken in and fed, horses 

 and men, even too sumptuously, in a palm and timber 

 house. Then we wandered out to see the site of his intended 

 mansion, with the rich wooded hills of the Latagual to the 

 north, and all around the unbroken forest, where, he told 

 us, the howling monkeys shouted defiance morning and 

 eveninc^ at him who did 



*' Invade their ancient solitary reign ." 



Then we went down to see the Coolie barracks, where the 

 folk seemed as happy and well cared for as they were certain 

 to be under such a master; then down a rocky pool in 

 the river, jammed with bare white logs (as in some North 

 American forest), which had been stopped in flood by one 



