I could not punish my misleader by stinting his fare, for I knew that I had only myself to blame. He was an honest fellow after all. In the disturbance of my mind I left a rather valuable umbrella in his buggy. He discovered it after he had gone, and had grace enough to see that it was returned to me. My entertainers were much amused at the cause of the misadventure, perhaps unique of its kind: to address homilies to the black people on the treatment of their wives not being the fashion in those parts. THE HIGH WOODS OF TRINIDAD. CHARLES KINGSLEY. [The skilled and popular novelist to whom we owe our present selection seems to have entertained for years a vivid wish to see the glory of the tropics, the achievement of which desire is put upon record in "At Last," the work from which we quote. In his "Westward Ho" he had years before given a warmly-delineated imaginary picture of the tropics, but waited for years afterwards to see these scenes in their picturesque reality. He tells well the story of the tropical "High Woods."] And now we set ourselves to walk to the depot, where the government timber was being felled, and the real "High Woods" to be seen at last. Our path lay along the half-finished tramway, through the first cacao plantation I had ever seen, though, I am happy to say, not the last by many a one. Imagine an orchard of nut-trees, with very large, long leaves. Each tree is trained to a single stem. Among them, especially near the path, grow plants of the common hot-house Datura, its long white flowers perfuming all the air. They have been planted as landmarks, to prevent the young cacao-trees being cut over when the weeds are cleared. Among them, too, at some twenty yards apart, are the stems of a tree looking much like an ash, save that it is inclined to throw out broad spurs like a ceiba. You look up and see that they are Bois immortelles, fifty or sixty feet high, one blaze of vermilion against the blue sky. Those who have stood under a Lombardy poplar in early spring and looked up at its buds and twigs showing like pink coral against the blue sky, and have felt the beauty of the sight, can imagine faintly--but only faintly--the beauty of these "madres de cacao,"--cacao mothers, as they call them here,--because their shade is supposed to shelter the cacao-trees, while the dew collected by their leaves keeps the ground below always damp.