The "Residence" stands in a fine situation, in large grounds of its own, at the foot of the mountains. It has been lately built, regardless of expense, for the colony is rich, and likes to do things handsomely. On the lawn, under the windows, stood a tree which was entirely new to me, an enormous ceiba or silk-cotton-tree, umbrella-shaped, fifty yards in diameter, the huge and buttressed trunk throwing out branches so massive that one wondered how any woody fibre could bear the strain of their weight, the boughs twisting in and out till they made a roof over one's head, which was hung with every fantastic variety of parasites. Vast as the ceibas were which I saw afterwards in other parts of the West Indies, this was the largest. The ceiba is the sacred tree of the negro, the temple of Jumbi, the proper house of Obeah. To cut down one is impious. No black in his right mind would wound even the bark. A Jamaica police officer told me that if a ceiba had to be removed, the men who used the axe were well dosed with rum to give them courage to defy the devil. From Government House we strolled into the adjoining Botanical Gardens. I had long heard of the wonders of these. The reality went beyond description. Plants with which I was familiar as _shrubs_ in English conservatories were here expanded into forest giants, with hundreds of others of which we cannot raise even Liliputian imitations. Let man be what he will, nature in the tropics is always grand. Palms were growing in the greatest luxuriance, of every known species, from the cabbage towering up into the sky to the fan-palm of the desert whose fronds are reservoirs of water. Of exogenous trees the majority were leguminous in some shape or other, forming flowers like a pea or vetch and hanging their seeds in pods; yet in shape and foliage they distanced far the most splendid ornaments of an English park. They had Old-World names with characters wholly different: cedars which were not conifers, almonds which were no relations of peaches, and gum-trees as unlike eucalypti as one tree can be unlike another. Again, you saw ferns which you seemed to recognize till some unexpected anomaly startled you out of your mistake. A gigantic Portugal laurel, or what I took for such, was throwing out a flower direct from the stem like a cactus. Grandest among them all, and happily in full bloom, was the sacred tree of Burmah, the _Amherstia nobilis_, at a distance like a splendid horse-chestnut, with crimson blossoms in pendent bunches, each separate flower in the convolution of its parts exactly counterfeiting a large orchid, with which it had not the faintest affinity, the Amherstia being leguminous like the rest.