A LOST FEBRUARY 



What made the old Scotch rhyme constantly 

 hum itself in my mind, I do not know : — 



" Little did my mither think the day she cradled me. 

 The lands I was to travel in, the death I was to dee.*' 



Here we were in strange lands, indeed, but we 

 had no fear of leaving our bones upon the sands 

 of Great Salt Pond. 



And surely the reception we met with at Port 

 Henderson, at the hands of a family whose ac- 

 quaintance we had previously made, does not be- 

 long to the tale of our woes, but of our joys. Such 

 hospitality, — food, cheer, rest, — all so freely, gladly 

 given, one would rarely find at home ; but in Ja- 

 maica we found it everywhere. The generous 

 human affections and impulses seem to grow as 

 luxuriantly there as the vegetation. A pail of drink- 

 ing-water was provided us here, as we should find 

 none at Salt Pond, and in the early evening, the full 

 moon flooding the sea and the land with its light, we 

 set out for the pond, an hour's row distant, keeping 

 under the abrupt, high, rocky shore, over a glassy 

 sea, in the soft, luminous tropical night. Leisurely 

 we rounded point after point, till the mountain 

 ended and a low bushy shore was before us. In this, 

 somewhere, was the narrow, almost liidden open- 

 ing into Great Salt Pond. But the boy has a keen 

 sense of topography ; he had been there once before 

 by daylight ; so, with an instinct as unerring as 



253 



