As I went up the steep mountain-path alone--for ladies ride only with such an unmounted domestic escort in Jamaica--I happened to overtake a tall gentleman with a handsome rather Jewish face and a pair of extremely lustrous black eyes, who was mounted on a beautiful chestnut mare just in front of me. The horse-paths in the Port Royal mountains are very narrow, being mere zigzag ledges cut half-way up the precipitous green slopes of fern and club-moss, so that there is seldom room for two horses to pass abreast, and it is necessary to wait at some convenient corner whenever you see another rider coming in the opposite direction. At the first opportunity the tall Jewish-looking gentleman drew aside in such a corner, and waited for me to pass. "Pray don't wait," I said, as soon as I saw what he meant; "your horse will get up faster than my pony, and if I go in front I shall keep you back unnecessarily." "Not at all," he answered, raising his hat gracefully; "you are a stranger in the hills, I see. It is the rule of these mountain-paths always to give a lady the lead. If I go first and my mare breaks into a canter on a bit of level, your pony will try to catch her up on the steep slopes, and that is always dangerous." Seeing he did not intend to move till I did, I waived the point at last and took the lead. From that moment I don't know what on earth came over my lazy old pony. He refused to go at more than a walk, or at best a jog-trot, the whole way to Newcastle. Now the rise from the plain to the cantonments is about four thousand feet, I think (I am a dreadfully bad hand at remembering figures), and the distance can't be much less, I suppose, than seven miles. During all that time you never see a soul, except a few negro pickaninnies playing in the dustheaps, not a human habitation, except a few huts embowered in mangoes, hibiscus-bushes, and tree-ferns. At first we kept a decorous silence, not having been introduced to one another; but the stranger's mare followed close at my pony's heels, pull her in as he would, and it seemed really too ridiculous to be solemnly pacing after one another, single file, in this way for a couple of hours, without speaking a word, out of pure punctiliousness. So at last we broke the ice, and long before we got to Newcastle we had struck up quite an acquaintance with one another. It is wonderful how well two people can get mutually known in the course of two hours' _tete-a-tete_, especially under such peculiar circumstances. You are just near enough to one another for friendly chat, and yet not too near for casual strangers. And then Isaac with the portmanteau behind was quite sufficient escort to satisfy the _convenances_. In England, one's groom would have to be mounted, which always seems to me, in my simplicity, a distinction without a difference.