The lower gallery was paved with small diamond-shaped slabs of blue and white marble, the very look of which added to the coolness. "Why, Mr Hudson, how glorious! nothing superior to this even in _ould_ Ireland." The American laughed, and nodded in the direction of his daughter. I turned my eye in the same direction, and met hers. She had apparently been observing how I was affected, at least so my vanity whispered: she blushed slightly, and looked another way. I saw I must say something. "Indeed, Miss Hudson, I thought you had not been above two months in the island. Did you not come down in the American frigate"---- She smiled. "I did, Mr Brail; but it was the cruise before last--we have been six months here." "Six months! and are all these glorious plants the growth of six months?" "Ay, that they are," quoth Listado; "most of them have not been planted more than _six weeks_." The inside of this large mansion was laid out more for comfort than show; the rooms, that all opened into the corridors already mentioned, were large and airy, but, with the exception of a tolerable dining-room, drawing-room, and the apartments of the ladies, very indifferently furnished. They were lit from without by the usual heavy wooden unglazed balconies, common both in New and Old Spain, which appear to have been invented more for the purpose of excluding the heat than admitting the light. In front of the house, and on each side, were large white terraced platforms, with shallow stone ledges, built in flights, like gigantic stairs on the hillside. On this the coffee was thickly strewed in the red husk, or pulp, as it is called, to dry in the sun. Little Dicky took the berries to be cherries, until the pulp stuck in his little teeth. The opposite hill had been cleared, and was covered with coffee-bushes; and right below us, in the bottom of the deep ravine, a tree-screened rivulet murmured and brawled alternately over a rugged bed of limestone rock, as the breeze rose and fell. In the northernmost nook of the cleared field, the negro houses, as usual surrounded with palm, star-apple, and orange trees, were clustered below an overhanging rock like eagles' nests, with blue threads of smoke rising up from them in still spiral jets, until it reached the top of the breezy cliff that sheltered them, when it suddenly blew off, and was dissipated. Beyond these lay a large field of luxuriant guinea grass, covered with bullocks and mules, like black dottings on the hillside. In every other direction one unbroken forest prevailed; the only blemish on the fair face of nature was man: for although the negroes that we saw at work appeared sleek and fat, yet, being most of them fresh from the ship, there was a savageness in the expression of their countenances, and in their half-naked bodies, that had nothing Arcadian in it.