Here reigned in all its majesty the bread-fruit tree, with broad serrated leaves, like a gigantic horse-chestnut, sheltering the more fragile trees that grow only beneath its shadow, and acting as the "mother of the cocoa"-- el madre del cacao--as the Spaniards call it.
But, I wish to go back now to the memorable day when Jake set off so briskly on his errand to see if the English mail steamer had arrived, leaving me on the terrace in front of our house wondering, as he speeded on his way, whether the packet was in sight; and, if she had been signalled, trying to surmise what news she would bring.
I was really very anxious about the matter, and I will tell you the reason why.
My father was an officer of the royal navy, who found it a hard thing, with an increasing family, to make both ends meet in the mother country on his half-pay.

At last, sick of waiting for active employment afloat during the long stagnation in the service occasioned by the interregnum of peace that lasted almost from Waterloo up to the time of the Crimean war, he determined, like Cincinnatus, to "beat his sword into a ploughshare." In other words, he abandoned the fickle element on which he had passed the early days of his manhood and emigrated to the West Indies, to see whether he might not improve his fortunes by investing what little capital he had in a coffee and cocoa plantation in the island where my scene opens.

A couple of months or so before, he had taken a trip across the Atlantic to arrange some money matters with his London agent, and we were now expecting his return by every mail.
Beyond this, my father had more than half-hinted that, as soon as he got back to Grenada, he would send me over to England in my turn to go to school, when, most likely, I would have to bid adieu to my West Indian home for good and all; for, my fervent desire was to follow in dad's footsteps and enter the navy as soon as I was able to pass the admiralty examination--a desire to which dad, in spite of the scurvy way in which he had been treated by an ungrateful country, did not say nay, his ambition being that I should succeed where he failed if possible, for he was a true sailor and hankered after the sea yet.
It was not surprising, therefore, that I was so eager to learn whether the packet had come in, albeit her arrival would naturally bring to an end the little brief authority which I had been so proud to assume during dad's absence as the protector of my mother and sisters, besides being regarded by all the negro hands as "um lilly massa of um plantashun." Really, I esteemed myself at that period to be a most important and highly dignified person, being only a boy of thirteen years old then, and small-grown for my age at that! Jake had scarcely been out of sight five minutes when I began to look out for his return.

My impatience, indeed, quite got the better of my reason, for I ought to have known well enough, if I had only considered, that he could not have yet half accomplished the journey to the signal station on Richmond Hill, much less thought even of coming back, the willing darkey being as unable as anyone else to annihilate distance or space! It was a terribly hot day, being close on to the noontide hour, the thermometer under the shade of the verandah where I stood marking over a hundred degrees; while, goodness only knew what it was out in the open, where the sun's blistering rays produced such intense heat that the paintwork of the green jalousie shutters outside the windows of the house fairly frizzled up in liquid blotches! The air, too, was oppressively close and warm, just as when the door of an oven is opened in one's face, not a breath of wind stirring to agitate the still atmosphere; but, neither did this fact, nor did the blazing power of the glowing orb of day, which looked like a globe of fire in the centre of the heavens, affect the wild luxuriance of nature at Mount Pleasant.
As I gazed around, everything appeared to be invigorated instead of prostrated by the high temperature.
This seems to be the natural order of things in the tropics, that is, in respect of everything and everyone accustomed to broiling weather, like hot-house flowers and coloured gentry of the kidney of Jake and his sable brethren, whose ancestors, having been born under the sweltering equator, handed down to their descendants constitutions of such a nature that they seem fairly to revel in the heat, and appear to be all the healthier and happier the hotter it is! Ruby-throated humming-birds, with breasts of burnished gold, fluttered about the garden on the terrace in front of me in dainty flight, or else poised themselves in mid-air opposite the sweet-smelling blossoms of the frangipanni, their little wings moving so rapidly as to make them appear without motion; broad-backed butterflies, with black stripes across their yellow uniforms, floated lazily about, purposelessly, doing nothing, as if they could not make up their minds to anything; and the scent of heliotropes and of big cabbage roses, that blossomed in profusion on trees larger than shrubs, almost intoxicated the senses.
The eye, too, was charmed at the same time by the pinky prodigality of the "Queen of Flowers," and the purple profusion of the convolvulus, their colours contrasting with the soft green foliage of the bay-tree; while great masses of scarlet geranium, and myriad hues of different varieties of the balsam and Bird of Paradise plant were harmonised by the snowy chastity of the Cape jessamine and a hundred other sorts of lilies, of almost every tint, which encircled a warm-toned hibiscus, that seemed to lord it over them, the king of the floral world.
I was watching a little procession of "umbrella ants," as they are called, that were promenading across the marble flooring of the verandah, each of the tiny insects carrying above its head a tinier piece of the green leaf of some plant, apparently for the purpose of shielding itself from the sun, for they held up their shades just in the same way as a lady carries her parasol; when, all at once, I heard a heavy step outside, advancing along the terrace from the direction of the stables.
Without turning my head, or consulting watch or clock--or, even without looking up at the scorching sun overhead, had my eyes been sufficiently glare-proof to have stood the ordeal--I knew who the intruder was, and could have also told you that it was exactly mid-day.
Why ?--you may ask perhaps.
You will learn in a moment.
The heavy footstep came a pace nearer, and then paused; when, looking round, I beheld an old negro, with a withered monkey-like face, clad in the ordinary conventional costume of an African labourer in the West Indies.

His dress consisted of a loose pair of trousers and shirt of blue cotton check; and, on the top of his white woolly head was fixed on in some mysterious fashion a battered fragment of a straw hat, just of the sort that would be used by an English farmer as a scarecrow to frighten off the birds from his fields.
This was Pompey, Jake's rival; and, as he politely doffed his ragged head-gear with one hand, in deference to my dignity as "the young massa," he held out to me with his other paw a wine-glass whose foot, if ever it had one, had been broken-off at some remote period of time.
I knew what Pompey wanted as well as he did himself, but for my own amusement, and in order to hear him make his usual stereotyped announcement, I asked him a leading question.
"Well, what is it ?" I said.
"U'm come, rum!" was his laconic rejoinder--nothing more, but the sentence was sufficiently expressive.
Every day of the week, with the exception of Sundays, it had been always Pompey's privilege to have a quartern of rum served out to him, as if he were on board ship, at twelve o'clock, the ordinary grog-time; and, punctually at that hour every day, in the wet season or dry, he never failed to come up to the house for his allowance, bringing with him the footless wine-glass to receive the grateful liquor.