A LOST FEBRUARY 



One would stoop in his thirst to drink from a copious 

 limpid spring gushing out of the mountain-side, but 

 experience a feeling of surprise, if not of repugnance, 

 to find the water as warm as in a bathing-pool. This 

 cannot be the true source, you half think; the water 

 must have been flowing a long way in the sun some- 

 where. One is apt to forget that the temperature of 

 a spring represents, pretty nearly, the average yearly 

 temperature of a locaHty. They have a way in Ja- 

 maica of reducing the temperature of the drinking- 

 water many degrees by letting it drip slowly through 

 a porous earthen vessel into a pitcher beneath it. 

 Treated thus, one soon comes to regard it as very 

 satisfactory. 



Our course that first day soon brought us to the 

 Rio Cobre, along the rocky banks of which the road 

 leisurely took its way to Bog Walk. All the most 

 pleasing features of a clear, rapid, boulder-strewn 

 mountain river, the Rio Cobre presents. The rocks 

 are of limestone, old, worm-eaten, and very pictur- 

 esque, and the great lucid pools suggested trout and 

 salmon, though they held nothing finer than mullets. 

 On this stream we passed the plant that turns the 

 force of its falls and rapids into electricity, and so 

 furnishes the power that runs the trolley lines in 

 Kingston, twenty miles away. 



We passed the night at a lodging-house (no hotels 

 in the country in Jamaica) in Ewarton, and were 

 fairly well cared for by the yellow landlady and her 

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