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.

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