During leisure moments I shall probably look back to this day’s ride and to these enchanting scenes as one of the “gilt letter” chapters of my life; but at present, after a bath, the rapidity with which fried plantains, pine-apple syrup, and scorched sweet milk will disappear, would do a dyspeptic Northerner good to see! The property comes by Señora Pastorisa. She is, perhaps, five-and-twenty. Her eyes are as bright and dark as even Lord Byron could have wished them to be. Her complexion is that of a clear ripe orange. The place is extensive, containing say nineteen thousand acres, in a valley five miles wide, fenced in on either side by a spear of mountains, with a limpid stream running through the centre. Mocking-birds enliven every thing; parrots and paroquettes go around in droves, screaming and squawking like a very nuisance. Back of the house is a grove appropriated to honey-bees. They swarm on every log. (There were certainly over one hundred swarms.) Honey is considered of but little value anywhere in the mountains, and is often wasted in the streams, the wax only being preserved. This comes of having pack-mules and goat-paths instead of wagons and wagon-roads. Señor Pastorisa had informed me before of his desire to quit the town and improve his farm. All he needed was men who understood farming on the American plan. He has a plow, and intends harnessing an ox to-morrow to try the experiment of plowing. Now, it is clear that to plow the ground very successfully he will need at least a yoke of oxen--which he has, all but the yoke. This I would undertake to make, though I never did such a thing in my life, and always had a horror of an ox-yoke, anyway; but lo! there are no tools. So Señor Pastorisa needs hands, but with a very little _a priori_ reasoning it will be seen there are other things needed quite as much. One is a road. There is a natural outlet to the valley--there must be. The stream before the door makes towards the Isabella river. The Isabella empties into the sea, of course. I forgot to say Señora Pastorisa is “a little tinged”--the handsomest woman in the world. LETTER V. Dominican Republic. VALLEY OF THE ISABELLA--CUSTOMS OF THE NATIVES--CHAPTER ON SNAKES--A CALL FOR DINNER. “Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime; Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime; Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine, And all save the spirit of man is divine?”--BYRON. There had been one or two invigorating showers previous to our ride down the valley of the Isabella, and so there remained a great deal of slippery clay along the narrow pathways, which paths lay usually on the very verge of some mountain slope, embankment, or more exciting precipice. To have come off with only one or two bones broken, I should have been perfectly satisfied.