the Old Ferry Inn, the oldest inn in the New World. It stands in a
mass of luxuriant greenery on the very edge of the Rio Cobre swamps,
and is a place to be avoided at nightfall on that account. This fever
trap of an inn, being just half-way between Kingston and Spanish Town,
was, of all places in the island to select, the chosen meeting-place
of the young bloods of both towns in the eighteenth century. Here they
drove out to dine and carouse, and as they probably all got drunk,
many of them must have slept here, on the very edge of the swamp, to
die of yellow fever shortly afterwards.

Sleepy Spanish Town, the old capital, has a decayed dignity of its
own. The public square, with its stately eighteenth-century buildings,
is the only architectural feature I ever saw in the British West
Indies. Our national lack of imagination is typically exemplified in
the King's House, now deserted, which occupies one side of the square.
When it was finished in 1760, it was considered a sumptuous building.
The architect, Craskell, in that scorching climate, designed exactly
the sort of red-brick and white stone Georgian house that he would
have erected at, say, Richmond. With limitless space at his disposal,
he surrounded his house with streets on all four sides of it, without
one yard of garden, or one scrap of shade. No wonder that poor little
Lady Nugent detested this oven of an official residence. The interior,
though, contains some spacious, stately Georgian rooms; the
temperature being that of a Turkish bath.

Rodney's monument is a graceful, admirably designed little temple, and
the cathedral of a vague Gothic, is spacious and dignified. Spanish
Town cathedral claims to have been built in 1541, in spite of an
inscription over the door recording that "this church was thrown downe
by ye dreadfull hurricane of August ye 28, 1712, and was rebuilt in