There is a richness of colour and a fatness of substance in the foliage of every tree and shrub which I never met with before in any of my travels.

The stately palm, with its smooth white stem glittering in the sunbeams like a column of burnished silver; the waving bamboo growing in little clumps, and nodding in the gentle breeze with all the graceful appearance of a gigantic ostrich plume; groves of the mango, with its deep and dark foliage defying the sun's rays; the guava, growing at its feet, like an infant of the same family; the mammee--or _abricot de St.
Domingue_--with its rich green fruit hanging in clusters, and a foliage rivalling the mango; the dark and feathery tamarind; the light and graceful indigo; the slow-growing arrowroot, with its palmy and feathery leaves spreading like a tender rampart round its precious fruit; boundless fields of the rich sugar-cane; acres of the luscious pine apple; groves of banana and plantain; forests of cedar and mahogany; flowers of every hue and shade; the very jungle netted over with the creeping convolvulus,--these, and a thousand others, of which fortunately for the reader I know not the names, are continually bursting on the scene with equal profusion and variety, bearing lovely testimony to the richness of the soil and the mildness of the climate.
Alas! that this fair isle should be at one and the same time the richest gem in the crown of Spain, and the foulest blot on her escutcheon.

Her treaties are violated with worse than Punic faith, and here horrors have been enacted which would make the blood of a Nero curdle in his veins.
Do you ask, how are treaties violated?
When slaves are brought here by our cruisers, Spain is bound by treaty to apprentice them out for three years, so as to teach them how to earn a living, and then to free them.
My dear John Bull, you will be sorry to hear, that despite the activity of our squadron for the suppression of slavery, that faithless country which owes a national existence to oceans of British treasure, and the blood of the finest army the great Wellington ever led, has the unparalleled audacity to make us slave carriers to Cuba.

Yes, thousands of those who, if honour and truth were to be found in the Government of Spain, would now be free, are here to be seen pining away their lives in the galling and accursed chains of slavery, a living reproach to England, and a black monument of Spanish faith.

Yes, John Bull, I repeat the fact; thousands of negroes are bound here in hopeless fetters, that were brought here under the British flag.