Most of these dwellings are very pleasantly situated, generally upon a gentle slope, and every breeze that blows finds a ready entrance at the open windows. Some of them are built in the cottage style, with only one floor, elevated a few feet from the ground; just affording sufficient room for a snug and cool cellar, where the good inmates store their generous wines. These houses contain a spacious hall, (the principal room in a West Indian house, occupying about two-thirds of the whole dwelling, and where meals are taken,) a parlour, or drawing-room, generally opening with folding-doors into the first-named apartment, a small morning room, four or five bedrooms, and the remainder of the building is divided into butler’s pantry, larders, and a kind of lobby, where the numerous domestics assemble, and when not actually engaged in waiting at table, or ministering to their own ungovernable appetites, stretch themselves along the floor in all the luxuriance of idleness. The kitchens are detached from the house, for the purpose of evading the heat and smoke from the wood fires; and contiguous to them are a long line of “negro rooms,” (as they term the apartments in this country intended for the use of the domestics,) stables, and coach-houses, interspersed with “stock” houses for poultry, and pens for the accommodation of those unseemly animals vulgarly called hogs. These country residences are seldom devoid of company, who, in parties of three or four, leave the confinement of the town for the advantage of the purer air. The days are spent much after the same fashion. Between the hours of five and six in the morning, a tap comes at your chamber-door, and a black-visaged smiling damsel enters with shoeless feet, and grinning lips shewing their two rows of ivory, and with the accustomed “mornin’, missis,” presents you with a cup of delicious coffee. The morning’s costume arranged with due precision, you quit your chamber, and passing through the “hall,” where two or three black servant boys are spreading the snowy damask, and otherwise preparing for the plentiful breakfast, you gain the drawing-room. Stepping through its open windows or doors, you find yourself in a covered gallery, amid, perhaps, a group of children and their nurses, busily employed in various little infantile amusements. Upon the appearance of “the lady” these, however, are immediately postponed, as each miniature man or woman comes forward with native courtesy and outstretched hand, and offers the usual compliments.