home in the West Indies, and forms the staple food of the negroes.
When carefully prepared it really might pass for under-done bread,
prepared from very indifferent flour by an inexperienced and unskilled
baker. It is the immense variety of the foliage and the constantly
changing panorama that gives Bog Walk its charm, together with the
red, pink, and fawn-coloured trumpets of the hibiscus, dotting the
precipitous ramparts of rock over the rushing blue river. Bog Walk is
distinctly one of those places which no one with opportunities for
seeing it should miss. It opens out into an equally beautiful basin,
St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, of which Michael Scott gives an admirable
description in _Tom Cringle_. I should hardly select that steamy
cup in the hills as a place of residence, but as a natural
forcing-house and a sample of riotous vegetation, it is worth seeing.

The native orchids of Jamaica are mostly oncidiums, with insignificant
little brown and yellow flowers, and have no commercial value
whatever. The Guardsman, however, was obsessed with the idea that he
would discover some peerless bloom for which he would be paid hundreds
of pounds by a London dealer. Every silk-cotton tree is covered with
what Jamaicans term "wild pines," air-plants, orchids, and other
epiphytes, and every silk-cotton was to him a potential Golconda, so
whenever we came across one he wanted the buggy stopped, and up the
tree he went like a lamp lighter. I am bound to admit that he was an
admirable tree climber, but I objected on the score of delicacy to the
large rents that these aerial rambles occasioned in his white ducks.
On regaining the ground he loaded the buggy with his spoils, despite
the driver's assertion that "dat all trash." Unfortunately with his
epiphytes he brought down whole colonies of ants, and the Jamaican ant
is a most pugnacious insect with abnormal biting powers. After I had
been forced to disrobe behind some convenient greenery in order to rid