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.

The high-road runs past one stately entrance-gate after another;
entrances with high Georgian, carved stone gateposts surmounted with
vases, probably sent out ready-made from England; Adam entrances, with
sphinxes and the stereotyped Adam semi-circular railings, all very
imposing, and all alike derelict. Beyond the florid wrought-iron gates
the gravel drives disappear under a uniform sea of grass; the once
neatly shaved lawns are covered with dense "bush." All gone! Planters
and their fine houses alike! King Sugar has been for long dethroned.
The names of these places, "Amity," "Concord," "Orange Grove,"
"Harmony Hall," "Friendship," and "Fellowship Hall," all rather
suggest the names of Masonic Lodges, and seem to point to a certain
amount of conviviality. The houses themselves are hardly up to the
standard of their ambitious entrance-gates, for they are mostly of the
stereotyped Jamaican "Great House" type; plain, gabled buildings
surrounded by verandahs, looking rather like gigantic meat safes; but,
as they say in Ireland, any beggar can see the gatehouse, but few
people see the house itself, and I imagine that skilled craftsmen were
rare in Jamaica in the eighteenth century.

The attempt to reconstruct the life of one, two, or three hundred
years ago has always appealed to me, especially amidst very familiar