54 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
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 but 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-story 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. Rawson 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, unselected, 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. The 
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 available are the pick and the crowbar. By prying up 
the end of astone, or finding a crevice or making one in the rock, 
a place 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 pockets 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 
