The great staple of negro existence, and therefore the great staple of existence to the immense majority of the inhabitants, is the yam. There are some indigenous kinds; but the species most in use appear to have been brought in by the imported African slaves. This solid edible dwarfs our potatoes, a single root varying in weight from five to ten pounds, and sometimes even reaching the weight of fifty pounds. They are of all shapes, globular, finger shaped, and long; and the latter, with their thick, brown rinds, look more like billets of wood, crusted with earth, than anything else. People in this country are apt to imagine them to be a huge kind of sweet potato, with which they have no other connection than that both are edible roots. The white yams, boiled and mashed, are scarcely distinguishable from very superior white potatoes. Above ground the plant is a vine, requiring to be trained on a pole, and a yamfield looks precisely like a vineyard. But oh, the difference! while the vineyard calls up a thousand recollections of laughing girls treading the grape, and the sunny lands of story, a yamfield reminds you only that under the ground is a bulky esculent, which some months hence will be put into a negro pot, and boiled and eaten, with an utter absence of poetry, or of anything but appetite and salt. It is plain that in this case solid usefulness stands no chance with erratic and rather loose-mannered brilliancy. And yet some kinds of yam in flower diffuse a fragrance more exquisite, I am persuaded, than comes from any vineyard. So that, after all, their homely prose has some flavor of poetry, which, when African poets arise, will doubtless be duly canonized in song. As yet the small freeholders have chiefly occupied themselves in raising these 'ground provisions,' as yams, plantains, bananas, and the various vegetables are called. But they are more and more largely planting cane and coffee, greatly to their own advantage and that of the island.