It being so early, the Guardsman and I went out as we were, in pyjamas
and slippers, with, of course, sufficient head protection against the
fierce sun. Just a fortnight before we had left England under snow, in
the grip of a black frost; London had been veiled in incessant thick
fogs for ten days, and we had fallen straight into the most
exquisitely beautiful island on the face of the globe, bathed in
perpetual summer.
When we had traversed the grove of orange trees, we came upon a lovely
little sunk-garden, where beds of cannas, orange, sulphur, and
scarlet, blazed round a marble fountain, with a silvery jet splashing
and leaping into the sunshine. The sunk-garden was surrounded on three
sides by a pergola, heavily draped with yellow alamandas, drifts of
wine-coloured bougainvillaa, and pale-blue solanums, the size of
saucers. In the clear morning light it really looked entrancingly
lovely. On the fourth side the garden ended in a terrace dominating
the entire Liguanea plain, with the city of Kingston, Kingston
Harbour, Port Royal, and the hills on the far side spread out below us
like a map. Those hills are now marked on the Ordnance Survey as the
"Healthshire Hills." This is a modern euphemism, for the name
originally given to those hills and the district round them by the
soldiers stationed in the "Apostles' Battery," was "Hellshire," and
any one who has had personal experience of the heat there, can hardly
say that the title is inappropriate.
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