
6 
unquiet irrationality of the human coteries outside 
the garrison. One would have thought that a taste 
of this sort once established, and so easily gratified 
by the aid of the cruisers on the station, would hard- 
ly ever have been abandoned, Fruit-eating birds, 
and fruit-eating beasts may be kept readily ; but 
graminivorous animals, must starve at Port Royal; 
if grows no grass save in the little park where the 
salute and announcement guns are fired morning 
and evening. Every where else is grassless, what- 
ever else it may grow? The tribulus gives its rich 
yellow blossoms to the running poultry, and the 
eareering pigeons find pickings among the pea-pods 
of the crotalaria in the sands; but the sea birds, 
and the morass-hens would thrive, and herons and 
flamingoes might be kept as common here as they 
were about the Fort of Manzanilla in Cuba when I 
visited if some years ago. ‘There were scarcely a 
cottage on the beach there that had not white egrets 
standing four feet high,—scarlet ibises, and red 
flamingoes, coming and going into the cottage yards, 
and there were those cursorial birds that keep 
the houses free from insects running in and out the 
rooms; and there too, I saw the capromys the utia 
of the Indians, penned up and fed in an enclosure 
shadowed by the palm and paletuvier with the mock- 
ing-bird singing in cages. 
I have never seen a mocking-bird here at Port 
toyal, though a sweet song 1 heard Miss Stevens 
sing in some West Indian Melodrama at Covent 
Garden said— 
