A WELCOME CHANGE. 



149 



Deronshire Tors. And how welcome, as a temporary 

 change, the appearance of such country is to the eye, 

 wearied with a large dose of tropical forests, only those 

 who have known what it is to grow sick for the sight of 

 an English meadow and simple pastoral scenes can know. 

 One can, and does, become " fed up " at last, upon these 

 highly seasoned and cloying dishes of everlasting and 

 unvaried tropical richness. We were fresh from the 

 prodigal luxuriance and riotous vegetation of Venezuelan 

 forests and West Indian islands, where one's outlook 

 is often cramped and confined by dense barriers of impene- 

 trable verdure. One feels at times almost suffocated 

 by it. There are other times, especially when one is 

 trying to force a way through it, when an overwhelming 

 sense of irritation creeps into one's pent-up feelings, 

 and finds expression in either words or actions. One 

 slashes away at the creepers with a sense of personal 

 spite, and longs to be free. 



This island came as a breath of the open. The soft 

 Trade-winds sweep it from end to end. The air is dry 

 and fresh, instead of sweltering and humid. One walks 

 freely and at ease — ^untrammelled. The eye roves over 

 its broad stretches of struggling grass and the grey-green 

 of its acacias and lantana bushes and experiences a rest. 

 There is space ; there is freedom ; there is " distance." 

 One seems to have freed oneself, at last, from the clinging 

 undergrowth and creepers of the forest, and to have 

 emerged into the open and the sunlight. 



When we first sighted Blanquilla, our knowledge of it 

 was limited to the information we had gleaned from the 

 six lines with which it is dismissed in the West India 

 Pilot." Brevity of description, however, boded good in 

 one sense ; for if little was said of it, it afforded ground for 

 the assumption that it was uninhabited and worthless from 

 a commerical point of view, and therefore that we were 

 more hkely to find a spot uninfluenced by the meddlesome 

 interference of man. It was, therefore, a surprise when 

 the first things we saw were the large herds of donkeys and 



