210 



TRINIDAD : THEN AND NOW. 



over 4 * The Saddle, ' ' we will continue and wend our 

 way through the remainder of the village, on through 

 Moka estate and by the recently diverted and nicely 

 inclined road to Santa Cruz. When we have got to 

 the top, before entering the deep cutting through the 

 steep range of hills, separating the Maraval from the 

 Santa Cruz district, let us rest and take a glance, be- 

 hind us at the landscape spread out before our gaze, 

 dotted over by the small dwellings of peasant proprie- 

 tors or agricultural contractors, converting what, at 

 first sight, looks like barren hills into that which will, 

 in the near future, become magnificent cocoa estates, 

 thus showing that the genius and enterprise of man 

 can prove more potent than Nature's hostile spell. 

 While thus pondering over the picture of what might 

 have been — and very nearly was — the fate of this now 

 beautiful and prosperous valley for want of peasant 

 cultivators, we are forcibly reminded of what might 

 have happened in Trinidad when " King Sugar," the 

 sole hope of the absentee proprietors, began its down- 

 ward flow, whose tide was fast ebbing, bearing them 

 out to an inhospitable sea, and were it not for ' 6 a, 

 bold peasantry, their country's pride," sugar making 

 would have been numbered with the things of the 

 past, instead of which it has attained a new lease of 

 life which we hope may long continue. 



We will now pass over into the fair valley of 

 Santa Cruz, spread out like an enchanted fairy land, 

 and gaze on the mighty hills with which Nature has 

 surrounded this land of enchantment, as if to guard 

 the golden treasure locked up within its bosom. We 



