188 tjif: cocal. 



tlie lower Irish, sucli as Handy Andy ; and very fref|uent, I 

 am afraid, among the Xegros. But as might have been 

 expected the poor boy's moral sense had proved as shaky as 

 his intellectual powers. He had just taken a fancy to some 

 goods of his master's ; and had retreated, to enjoy them the 

 more securely, into the southern forests, with a couple 

 of brown policemen on his track. So he was likely to 

 undergo a more simple investigation than that which was 

 submitted to my analysis, viz. how he proposed to wash the 

 salt out of the sugar. 



We arrived after a while at Valencia, a scattered hamlet in 

 the woods, with a good shop or '' store " upon a village green, 

 under the verandah whereof lay, side by side wdth bottled ale 

 and biscuit tins, bags of Carapo ^ nuts ; trapezoidal brown 

 nuts enclosed originally in a round fruit which ought some 

 day to form a valuable article of export. Their bitter anthel- 

 minthic oil is said to have medicinal uses ; but it will be still 

 more useful for machiner}^ as it has like that curious flat 

 gourd the Sequa- the property of keeping iron from rust. 

 The tree itself, common here and in Guiana, is one of the 

 true Forest Giants ; we saw many a noble specimen of it in 

 our rides. Its timber is tough, not over heavy, and exten- 

 sively used already in the island ; ^vhile its bark is a febri- 

 fuge and tonic. In fact, it possesses all those qualities which 



1 Carapa Guianensis. - Feuillea corJifolia. 



