One of the regrets of an enthusiastic writer must ever be that he cannot visit all the lovely and interesting spots which he may so easily describe. The present one, enamoured with San Francisco, which he _has_ visited, and Singapore and Sydney, which as yet he hasn’t, would, if such writers as Charles Kingsley and Anthony Trollope are to be credited, add Trinidad to the list. Read the former’s “Letter from a West Indian Cottage Ornée,” or the latter’s description of a ride through the cool woods and sea-shore roads, to be convinced that Trinidad is one of the most charming islands in the whole world. Bamboos keep the cottage gravel path up, and as tubes, carry the trickling, cool water to the cottage bath; you hear a rattling as of boards or stiff paper outside your window: it is the clashing together of a fan-palm, with leaf-stalks ten feet long and fans more feet wide. The orange, the pine-apple, and the “flower fence” (_Poinziana_); the cocoa-palm, the tall Guinea grass, and the “groo-groos” (a kind of palm: _Acrocomia sclerocarpa_); the silk-cotton tree, the tamarind, and the Rosa del monte bushes—twenty feet high, and covered with crimson roses; tea shrubs, myrtles, and clove-trees intermingle with vegetation common elsewhere. Thus much for a mere chance view. The seaman ashore will note many of these beauties; but his superior officers will see more. The _cottage ornée_, to which they will be invited, with its lawn and flowering shrubs, tiny specimens of which we admire in hot-houses at home; the grass as green as that of England, and winding away in the cool shade of strange evergreens; the yellow cocoa-nut palms on the nearest spur of hill throwing back the tender blue of the distant mountains; groups of palms, with perhaps _Erythrinas umbrosa_ (_Bois immortelles_, they call them in Trinidad), with vermilion flowers—trees of red coral, sixty feet high—interspersed; a glimpse beyond of the bright and sleeping sea, and the islands of the Bocas “floating in the shining waters,” and behind a luxuriously furnished cottage, where hospitality is not a mere name, but a very sound fact; what on earth can man want more?