They seldom outlive their years of probation.

The explanation of this piece of statistics is curious.

The fact is that every now and then, when an old man dies, they bury him as one of the emancipados, whose register is sent in to the Government as dead; while the negro himself goes to work as a slave in some out-of-the-way plantation where no tales are told.
We left the marble-quarries, and rode for miles over a wide savannah.
The soil was loose and sandy and full of flakes of mica, and in the watercourses were fragments of granite, brought down from the hills.
Here flourished palm trees and palmettos, acacias, mimosas, and cactuses, while the mangoe and the guava tree preferred the damper patches nearer to the coast.

The hills were covered with the pine-trees from which the island has its name; and on the rising ground at their base we saw the strange spectacle of palms and fir trees growing side by side.
Where we came upon a stream, the change in the vegetation was astonishing.

It was a sudden transition from an English, plantation of fir trees into the jungle of the tropics, full of Indian figs, palms, lancewood, and great mahagua[1] trees, all knotted together by endless creepers and parasites; while the parrots kept up a continual chattering and screaming in the tree-tops.