It has none of those Corinthian pillars which your homesteads in America have.

Yet there is in it a simple elegance.

It has no carpets, but a shining mahogany floor, for there are few carpets in this land of heat.

It is a place where music and mirth and family voices would be fitting; but there are no family voices here, save such as speak with a negro lisp and oracularly.
I can hear music at this moment, and inside my castle.

It comes from the irrepressible throats of my cook and my housemaid, who have more joy in the language of the plantation than you could have in the songs of St.Angelus.The only person in this castle out of spirits is its owner.
My castle is embowered in a loose grove of palms and acacias, pimento shrubs, splendid star-apples, and bully-trees, with wild lemon, mahogany, dogwood, Jerusalem-thorn, and the waving plumes of bamboo canes.