S4 ISL-ES OF Str:N[MElt. 



gait, which equally grates upon the ear and offends the eye of 

 people from the States. Those whom we have seen Sundays 

 have been well and neatly hut not expensively dressed. 



The streets of these suburbs are narrow and cross each other 

 at right angles. Building lots have been laid out upon them, 

 upon which there is usually a small one-s-tory house, and some- 

 times two or more, embowered in orange, tamarind, cocoanut, 

 banana, sapodilla and other trees, and with flowering shrubs 

 and vines. Here, as elsewhere generally upon the island, so far 

 as we have seen it, the trees rise up out of the bare and naked 

 rocks. Gov. Eawson in his report for 1864, speaking of this 

 locality, says: '' Fruit trees of various kinds are crowded around 

 the dwellings and cottages, growing luxuriantly, but planted 

 without order, unselectcd, unpruned, and unimproved, often 

 finding a place and nourishment for their roots in crannies and 

 fissures in the rocks into which it would appear impossible for 

 them to penetrate." 



One can hardly believe his own eyes in looking at them. Tlie 

 plow and the spade, the harrow and the cultivator, the scythe 

 and the reaper would be as much out of place here as snowballs 

 in a baker's oven. The only implements of husbandry that can 

 be made availaljle are the pick and the crowbar. By prying up 

 the end of a stone, or finding a crevice or making one in the rock, 

 a ]3lace is found for slip, root, or seed, and when thus utilized, 

 small rootlets start out, follow all the minute inequalities of the 

 porous limestone, penetrate all the little j^ockets in the rock, run 

 over and down ledges ten to twenty feet high, searching for fis- 

 sures and crevices in the hard bottom of stone below, as if guided 

 by intelligence, and impelled onward by a strong and most tena- 

 cious love of life, while, at the same time, buds and twigs and 

 stems and branches push upwards, enlarge and multiply, draw- 

 ing rich supplies of food from a hot sun that warms but never 



