Doubtless he knows his own business best from long experience.

Indeed, as we stood broiling on the shore, we began somewhat to regret that European manners and customs prevented our adopting the Guaraon and Arawak fashion.
The mule-cart arrived; the lady of the party was put into it on a chair, and slowly bumped and rattled past the corner of Dundonald Street--so named after the old sea-hero, who was, in his lifetime, full of projects for utilising this same pitch--and up a pitch road, with a pitch gutter on each side.
The pitch in the road has been, most of it, laid down by hand, and is slowly working down the slight incline, leaving pools and ruts full of water, often invisible, because covered with a film of brown pitch-dust, and so letting in the unwary walker over his shoes.

The pitch in the gutter-bank is in its native place, and as it spues slowly out of the soil into the ditch in odd wreaths and lumps, we could watch, in little, the process which has produced the whole deposit--probably the whole lake itself.
A bullock-cart, laden with pitch, came jolting down past us; and we observed that the lumps, when the fracture is fresh, have all a drawn-out look; that the very air-bubbles in them, which are often very numerous, are all drawn out likewise, long and oval, like the air-bubbles in some ductile lavas.
On our left, as we went on, the bush was low, all of yellow Cassia and white Hibiscus, and tangled with lovely convolvulus-like creepers, Ipomoea and Echites, with white, purple, or yellow flowers.

On the right were negro huts and gardens, fewer and fewer as we went on--all rich with fruit-trees, especially with oranges, hung with fruit of every hue; and beneath them, of course, the pine- apples of La Brea.

Everywhere along the road grew, seemingly wild here, that pretty low tree, the Cashew, with rounded yellow-veined leaves and little green flowers, followed by a quaint pink and red- striped pear, from which hangs, at the larger and lower end, a kidney-shaped bean, which bold folk eat when roasted: but woe to those who try it when raw, for the acrid oil blisters the lips; and even while the beans are roasting, the fumes of the oil will blister the cook's face if she holds it too near the fire.
As we went onward up the gentle slope (the rise is one hundred and thirty-eight feet in rather more than a mile), the ground became more and more full of pitch, and the vegetation poorer and more rushy, till it resembled, on the whole, that of an English fen.