Once over the Monte Diavolo, quite a different Jamaica unrolls itself.
Broad pasture-lands replace the tropical house at Kew; rolling,
well-kept fields of guinea-grass, surrounded with neat, dry-stone
walls and with trim gates, give an impression of a long-settled land.
We were amongst the "pen-keepers," or stock-raisers here. This part of
the colony certainly has a home-like look; a little spoilt as regards
resemblance by the luxuriance with which creepers and plants, which at
home we cultivate with immense care in stove-houses, here riot wild in
lavish masses over the stone walls. If the cherished rarities of one
country are unnoticed weeds in another land, plenty of analogies in
other respects spring to the mind. I could wish though, for aesthetic
reasons, that our English lanes grew tropical Begonias, Coraline, and
a peculiarly attractive Polypody fern, similar to ours, except for the
young growths being rose-pink. Between Dry Harbour and Brown's Town
there is one succession of fine country-places, derelict for the most
part now, but remnants of the great days before King Sugar was
dethroned. Here the opulent sugar planters built themselves lordly
pleasure houses on the high limestone formation. Sugar grows best on
swampy ground, but swamps breed fever, so these magnates wisely made
their homes on the limestone, and so increased their days.
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