The hotels being all full, we took up our
quarters in a small boarding-house, standing in dense groves of orange
trees, where each shiver of the night breeze sent the branches of the
orange trees swish-swishing, and wafted great breaths of the delicious
fragrance of orange blossom into our rooms. I was in bed, when the
Guardsman, who had never been in the tropics before, rushed
terror-stricken into my room. "I have drunk nothing whatever," he
faltered, "but I must be either very drunk or else mad, for I keep
fancying that my room is full of moving electric lights." I went into
his room, where I found some half-dozen of the peculiarly brilliant
Jamaican fireflies cruising about. The Guardsman refused at first to
believe that any insect could produce so bright a light, and bemoaned
the loss of his mental faculties, until I caught a firefly and showed
him its two lamps gleaming like miniature motor head-lights.
Some pictures stand out startlingly clear-cut in the memory. Such a
one is the recollection of our first morning in Jamaica. The
Guardsman, full of curiosity to see something of the mysterious
tropical island into which we had been deposited after nightfall,
awoke me at daybreak. After landing from the mail-steamer in the dark,
we had had merely impressions of oven-like heat, and of a long,
dim-lit drive in endless suburbs of flimsily built, wooden houses,
through the spice-scented, hot, black-velvet night, enlivened with
almost indecently intimate glimpses into humble interiors, where
swarthy dark forms jabbered and gesticulated, clustered round smoky
oil-lamps; and as the suburbs gave place to the open country, the vast
leaves of unfamiliar growths stood out, momentarily silhouetted
against the blackness by the gleam of our carriage lamps.
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