The railway journey will enable you to see agricultural Jamaica. The plantations, great and small, skirt the railway track, and the traveller can note the varied beauties and interests of the fruits of the Indies. He will see full-grown banana clumps, heavy with fruit; and he will also see newly-planted banana striplings. The fields of pine-apples, which resemble fields of English bulrushes tinted dull red and gold, will charm him, and the pimento groves will remind him of English orchards. When the bamboo forests and the straggling palms come in view, he will remember with great contentment that he is in the tropics indeed. The birds and the butterflies are shy of the noise and mess of the locomotive, but still the traveller may see enough of the beauty of the fluttering insects to teach him something of the loveliness which is born beneath the shelter of tropical foliage. If he is fortunate enough to see a tiny humming bird sipping from the cup of a scented blossom, he will have seen that which will persuade him to sit in a flower-spangled hedgerow for hours in order that he may witness the picture again. It is said, and I have put it on record, that Columbus crumpled a piece of paper in order to give his patron a correct impression of the appearance of the island. It is the crumpled, irregular, casual Jamaica that the railroad traveller sees. The valleys, the plateaus, the hills, the mountains, rivers and ravines, pass along the carriage window in bewildering succession; the views one sees are beautiful and mystical beyond comprehension--like the tints in a stormy sunset. One thing at least the intelligent traveller will learn on his railway journey; he will realise that the beauty of the tropics can never be comprehended by the finite mind of man. He will thank God for the beauty he has seen, and if he is a wise man, there he will allow the matter to rest. To attempt to catalogue the beauties of Jamaica is a task too infinitely foolish: as well essay an analysis of a moonbeam. [Illustration: A QUAY, ST. ANN’S BAY, JAMAICA] ALLIGATOR SHOOTING IN A WEST INDIAN SWAMP CHAPTER XVIII ALLIGATOR SHOOTING IN A WEST INDIAN SWAMP Jamaica is a land of perpetual peace and sunshine. The hills and valleys of this, the most beautiful of all the fair islands of the West Indies, are always clothed in a great profusion of the richest greenery; its soil gives birth to almost every luscious fruit the world contains; the sweet scents of its myriad blossoms give to the land an atmosphere of the wildest loveliness; yet it is a country almost entirely barren of native animal life. Birds there are in great numbers, and insects too; fish of many kinds swarm in the rivers and mountain torrents, but the languorous climate of the Queen of the Antilles gives shelter to no four-footed game of the plains or forest lands. The place has no claim on the hearts of sportsmen.