Immediately behind the homestead of Bluefields, a lane, confined for a mile or two between dry-stone walls, leads to the road which winds in a zig-zag line to the top of the Bluefields ridge. This lane possesses many attractions. By the wall on each side grow trees, which afford grateful shade, and many of them load the evening air with dewy fragrance. Orange-trees, profusely planted, give out in spring gushes of odour from their waxen blossoms, and in autumn tempt the eye with their “golden fruitage.” The Pride of China, lovely in its graceful leaves and spikes of lilac blossoms, and not less sweet-scented than the orange; the pimento, dense and glossy, with another, but not inferior, character of beauty; are varied by the less showy, but still valuable, cedar and guazuma. The various species of _echites_ trail their slender stems and open their brilliant flowers, along the top of the wall, and the pretty _Banisteria_ displays its singular yellow blossoms, or scarlet berries at its foot; while near the top of the lane, tangled and matted masses of the _night-blowing cereus_ depend from the trees, or sprawl over the walls, expanding their magnificent, sun-like flowers, only to “the noon of night.” Here and there huge black nests of _termites_ look like barrels built into the wall, whose loose stones, grey with exposure, and discoloured with many-tinted lichens, afford a sombre relief to the numerous large-leafed _arums_ that climb and cluster above them. To the left the mountain towers, dark and frowning; the view on the right is bounded by a row of little rounded hills, studded with trees and clumps of pimento. But between the traveller and either, extend the fields of guinea-grass, which are enclosed by these boundary walls. In the autumn, when the grass is grown tall, and the panicles of seed waving in the wind give it a hoary surface, the little Grass-quits, both of this and the following species, throng hither in numerous flocks, and perching in rows on the slender stalks, weigh them down, while they rifle them of the farinaceous seeds. In March, I have found the stomach of the Yellow-face full of seeds of the common pasture grasses; and I have been struck with the enormous dilatation of the membranous craw, which, as in the Gallinaceæ, occupies the hollow of the _furcula_. D’Orbigny, who has given a good figure of it, in Sagra’s Cuba, alludes to its prevalence in all the great Antilles. At the Havanna, he says it is frequently caged, being very docile, and readily learning to sing. I have never heard from it any other note than a quivering chirrup as it flits from bush to bush.