After having been detained in town several days longer than I had reckoned on, by heavy rains, which ran through the streets in rivers, and filled the bed of Sandy Gully, through which we must pass, with a rushing torrent of irresistible strength, a small party of us left Kingston one morning for the mountains of St. Andrew and Metcalfe, among which lie the stations of the American missionaries whom we had come to join. We were mounted on the small horses of the country, whose first appearance excited some doubts in the mind of a friend whether he was to carry the horse or the horse him. However, they are not quite ponies, and their blood is more noble than their size, being a good deal of it Arab. They are decidedly preferable for mountain travel to larger animals. We directed our course over the hot plains towards the mountains which rose invitingly before us, ready to receive us into their green depths. On leaving the town, we passed first through sandy lanes bordered by cactus hedges, rising in columnar rows, and then came out upon the excellent macadamized road over which thirteen of the sixteen miles of our journey lay. As we went along we met a continual succession of groups of the country people, mostly women and children, coming into Kingston with their weekly load of provisions to sell. They eyed us with expressions varying from good-natured cordiality to sullenness, and occasionally we heard a rude remark at the expense of the 'Buckras;' but for the most part their demeanor was civil and pleasant. Most of them had the headloads without which a negro woman seems hardly complete in the road, varying in dimensions from a huge basket of yams or bananas to an ounce vial. How such a slight thing manages to keep its perpendicular with their careless, swinging gait, is something marvellous, but they manage it to perfection. Almost every group, in addition, had a well-laden donkey--comical little creatures, looking hardly bigger under their huge hampers than well-sized Newfoundland dogs, and hurrying nimbly along, with a speed that betokened a wholesome remembrance of a good many hard thrashings in the past and a reasonable dread of similar ones in the future. If I held the doctrine of transmigration, I should be firmly persuaded that the souls of parish beadles, drunken captains, and other petty tyrants, shifted quarters into the bodies of Jamaica negroes' donkeys. One patriotic black woman, whose donkey was rather refractory, relieved her mind by exclaiming, in a tone of infinite disgust, 'O-h-h you Roo-shan!' accompanying her objurgation by several emphatic demonstrations on his hide of how she was disposed to treat a 'Rooshan' at that present moment.[8]