It was a
natural and human taste--the cabbage from the tree-top boiled for a
simple yet sumptuous meal.
He liked simplicity. He did not, as so many did in Jamaica, drink claret
or punch at breakfast soon after sunrise. In a land where all were bon-
vivants, where the lowest tradesmen drank wine after dinner, and rum,
brandy and water, or sangaree in the forenoon, a somewhat lightsome view
of table-virtues might have been expected of the young unmarried planter.
For such was he who, from the windows of his "castle," saw his domain
shimmering in the sun of a hot December day.
It was Dyck Calhoun.
With an impatient air he took up the sheets that he had been reading.
Christmas Day was on his nerves. The whole town of Kingston, with its
twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants, had but one church. If he entered
it, even to-day, he would have seen no more than a hundred and fifty to
two hundred people; mostly mulattoes--"bronze ornaments"--and peasants in
shag trousers, jackets of coarse blue cloth, and no waistcoats, with one
or two magistrates, a dozen gentlemen or so, and probably twice that
number of ladies.
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