VALLEY
IN
THE
BLUE
MOUNTAINS
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generations of human creatures to play their parts upon her surface as they please. She spins on upon her own course; and seas and skies, and crags and forests, are spiritual and beautiful as ever. Gordon's Town is a straggling village in the Blue Range underneath Newcastle. Colonel J — had a villa there, and one afternoon he took me over to see it. You pass abruptly from the open country into the mountains. The way to Gordon's Town was by the side of the Hope river, which cuts its way out of them in a narrow deep ravine. The stream was now trickling faintly among the stones; the enormous boulders in the bed were round as cannon balls, and weighing hundreds of tons, show what its power must be in the coming down of the floods. Within the limits of the torrent, which must rise at such times thirty feet above its winter level, the rocks were bare and stern, no green thing being able to grow there. Above the line the tropical vegetation was in all its glory: ferns and plantains waving in the moist air; cedars, tamarinds, gum trees, orange trees striking their roots among the clefts of the crags, and hang ing out over the abysses below them. Aloes flung up their tall spiral stems; flowering shrubs and creepers covered bank and slope with green and blue and white and yellow, and above and over our heads, as we drove along, stood out the great limestone blocks which thunder down when loosened by the rain. Farther up the hill sides, where the slopes are less precipitous, the forest has been burnt off by the unthrifty blacks, who use fire to clear the ground for their yam gardens, and destroy the timber over a dozen acres when they intend to cultivate but a single one. The landscape suffers less than the soil. The effect to the eye is merely that the mountains in Jamaica, as in temperate climates, become bare at a moderate altitude, and their outlines stand out sharper against the sky. Introduced among scenery of this kind, we followed the