winds slowly through the "Cockpit" country; now panting laboriously up
steep inclines, now sliding down a long gradient, with a prodigious
grinding of brakes and squeaking of wheels. The scenery is gorgeous,
but there is no produce to handle at the various stations, and but few
passengers to pick up. As we found every hotel full at our
destination, we had to take refuge in a boarding-house, though warned
that it was only for coloured people. We found four subfuse young men,
with complexions shaded from pale coffee-colour to deep sepia, at
supper in the dining-room.

"May I inquire, sir," said the Guardsman, with ready tact, to the
lightest-complexioned of the young men, "how long you have been out
from England?"

"I was born in Jamaica, sir," answered the immensely gratified youth,
"and have never left it."

"And do you, sir," continued the Guardsman to the swarthiest of them
all, "feel the heat of the climate much? It is rather a change from
England, isn't it?"

"I, too, sir, have never left Jamaica," replied the delighted young
man.

So enchanted were these dusky youths at having been mistaken for white
men, that they simply overwhelmed us with attentions during the rest
of our stay there.

The Guardsman was bent on shooting an alligator, and having heard that
these pleasant saurians swarmed in a swamp beyond the town, went there