After three miles' travel over these roads of nature's making, in a rain which at last became quite uncomfortable, we came finally to Oberlin Mission House. A West Indian country house, without fire or carpets, must be very pleasingly fitted up not to look dreary in a wet day, and Oberlin House appeared rather cheerless as we alighted with streaming garments, the romance pretty well soaked out of us for the time. But after supper and a change of clothes, and the clearing away of the clouds, our dismal spirits cleared up too, and we went out into the garden to enjoy the rare flowers and plants--the crimson-leaved ponsetto, the Bleeding Heart, with its ensanguined centre, the curiously pied and twisted Croton Pictum, the Plumbago, well named from the leaden hue of its flowers, the long, deep-red leaves of the Dragon's Blood, the purple magnificence of the Passion flower, relieved by the more familiar beauty of the Four o'clock and of the Martinique rose. Seeing something that pleased me, I stepped forward to view it more narrowly, when a sudden access of acute pain in one foot, quickly spreading to the knee, admonished me that I had got into mischief in the shape of an ant's nest, and gave me the first instalment of a lesson I learned in due time very thoroughly, that the beauties of Jamaica are to be enjoyed with a very cautious regard to the paramount rights of the insect creation. When I went to bed, I found the bedclothes saturated with dampness. But I learned that it was like a Newport fog, too saline to be mischievous. The atmosphere of the island, even in the brightest and most elastic weather, is so impregnated with moisture, that a Leyden jar will lose its charge in being taken across the room, and an electrical machine will not work without a pan of coals under the cylinder. But as no part of the island is more than twenty-five miles from the sea, this continual moisture appears to be quite innocuous, its worst effect being the musty smell which it causes in everything in the mountains, where there is the most rain. Use fortunately takes from us the perception of this, or it would be quite intolerable. Perpetual summer, and the utmost glory of earth, sky, and sea, are not to be enjoyed without drawbacks that would make a careful housekeeper very doubtful about the desirableness of the exchange. And so ended my first day in the country. CHAPTER IV. GEOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE ISLAND I had intended writing some of my first impressions about Jamaica, particularly its negro population. But I find, on reviewing my residence of five years and a half in the tranquil island, that first impressions melt so imperceptibly into final conclusions, that it appears best not to attempt a too formal separation of them. Before recounting the results of my own experience, however, in any form, it will not be amiss to attempt some general description of the island and of its population, and to give a slight sketch of its history.