Now its sides are quarried for the only road-stone met with for miles around; cultivated for pasture, in which the round- headed mango-trees grow about like oaks at home; or terraced for villas and gardens, the charm of which cannot be told in words.

All round it, rich sugar estates spread out, with the noble Palmistes left standing here and there along the roads and terraces; and everywhere is activity and high cultivation, under the superintendence of gentlemen who are prospering, because they deserve to prosper.
Between the cliff and the shore nestles the gay and growing little town, which was, when we took the island in 1795, only a group of huts.

In it I noted only one thing which looked unpleasant.

The negro houses, however roomy and comfortable, and however rich the gardens which surrounded them, were mostly patched together out of the most heterogeneous and wretched scraps of wood; and on inquiry I found that the materials were, in most cases, stolen; that when a Negro wanted to build a house, instead of buying the materials, he pilfered a board here, a stick there, a nail somewhere else, a lock or a clamp in a fourth place, about the sugar-estates, regardless of the serious injury which he caused to working buildings; and when he had gathered a sufficient pile, hidden safely away behind his neighbour's house, the new hut rose as if by magic.

This continual pilfering, I was assured, was a serious tax on the cultivation of the estates around.