open savanna or pasture around the homestead.

Here are grazing donkeys, mules, and cattle, while the chickens run
under the shrubs for shelter, reminding one of home. The house is
surrounded with crotons and other brilliant plants, beyond which is a
rose garden, the special pride of the planter's wife. If the sun has
gone down behind the western hills, the boys will come out and play
cricket in the hour before sunset. These savannas are the beauty-spots
of a country clothed in woodland from sea-shore to mountain-top.

[Illustration--Black and White Plate: Ortinola, Maracas, Trinidad.]

Next morning we are awaked by a blast from a conch-shell. It is 6.30,
and the mist still clings in the valley; the sun will not be over the
hills for another hour or more, so in the cool we join the labourers
on the mule-track to the higher land, and for a mile or more follow a
stream into the heart of the estate. If it is crop-time, the men will
carry a _goulet_--a hand of steel, mounted on a long bamboo--by the
sharp edges of which the pods are cut from the higher branches without
injury to the tree. Men and women all carry cutlasses, the one
instrument needful for all work on the estate, serving not only for
reaping the lower pods, but for pruning and weeding, or "cutlassing,"
as the process of clearing away the weed and brush is called.

[Illustration--Drawing: GOULET AND WOODEN SPOON.]

[Illustration--Drawing: CUTLASSES.]

Gathering the pods is heavy work, always undertaken by men. The pods
are collected from beneath the trees and taken to a convenient heap,