I turned my dazzled eyes down again and looked into the delicious darkness under the bushes. The ground was brown with fallen leaves, or green with ferns; and here and there a slant ray of sunlight pierced through the shade, and flashed on the brown leaves, and on a gray stem, and on a crimson jewel which hung on the stem, and there, again, on a bright orange one; and as my eye became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the stems and larger boughs far away into the wood were dotted with pods, crimson, or yellow, or green, of the size and shape of a small hand closed with the fingers straight out. They were the cacao-pods, full of what are called at home cacao-nibs. And there lay a heap of them, looking like a heap of gay flowers; and by them sat their brown owner, picking them to pieces and laying the seeds to dry on a cloth. I went up and told him that I came from England, and never saw cacao before, though I had been eating and drinking it all my life; at which news he grinned amusement till his white teeth and eyeballs made a light in that dark place, and offered me a fresh broken pod, that I might taste the pink sour sweet pulp in which the rows of the nibs lie packed, a pulp which I found very pleasant and refreshing. He dries his cacao-nibs in the sun, and, if he be a well-to-do and careful man, on a stage with wheels, which can be run into a little shed on the slightest shower of rain; picks them over and over, separating the better quality from the worse; and at last sends them down on mule-back to the sea, to be sold in London as Trinidad cocoa, or perhaps in Paris to the chocolate-makers, who convert them into chocolate, "Menier" or other, by mixing them with sugar and vanilla--both, possibly, from this very island. This latter fact once inspired an adventurous German with the thought that he could make chocolate in Trinidad just as well as in Paris. And (so goes the story) he succeeded; but the fair Creoles would not buy it. It could not be good; it could not be the real article, unless it had crossed the Atlantic twice to and fro from that centre of fashion, Paris. So the manufacture, which might have added greatly to the wealth of Trinidad, was given up, and the ladies of the island eat naught but French chocolate, costing, it is said, nearly four times as much as home-made chocolate need cost.