When first I went to Jamaica, a friend, Mr Clarence Lopez, with kindness I can never forget, lent me a house in the northern part of the island in the parish of Trelawny. It was the Great House on the Hyde, a pen about eight miles as the crow flies from the sea. Jamaica is 144 miles long at the longest portion and 49 miles broad at the broadest, it is little more than half the size of Wales, but when I went to that house set on the side of a mountain with a glorious view of hill and valley, coco-palm and banana, I went to the very loneliest place I have ever lived in in my life, and I have been in many lands. It is one of the loveliest too. Behind are the mountains, clothed to their peaks in woodland, bound together with all manner of creeping vines and the mountains fling their arms round, so that they seem to guard the old house from the winds of the south, and all in the ground grow pimento and orange and lemon trees, handsome, broad-leaved bread-fruit and tall naseberry trees, while the little garden on a plateau just behind the house is a wilderness of roses, pink and white, and red and yellow, and fragrant as the first roses that ever grew in a Persian garden. The house is two storied, and though it has many annexes the main building stands by itself. Much money has been expended upon it. Two great flights of stone steps lead up to the porch at the front door, the floor of which is tessellated as carefully as if it had been done in Italy; all the handles of the doors are of heavy cut glass and so are the door plates, while gilded beading decorates what they call in Jamaica the two great halls, that is the dining room downstairs and its fellow upstairs. The floors are of polished mahogany and so is the staircase; but no one had lived in it for years and “Ichabod” was written over everything.