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the beach a market beneath a row of trees, with canoes drawn up to be unladen, and gay dresses of every hue. The surf whispered softly on the beach. The cheerful murmur of voices came off the shore, and above it the tinkling of some little bell, calling good folks to early mass."

A brilliant, exquisite picture, but one through which runs the sombre element of perpetual danger. The mountain is any thing but a peaceful neighbor. In the eruption of 1797 he hurled out vast volumes of pumice, ashes, and sulphureous vapors, and since then he has shown an ugly and uncertain humor. Smoke by day, and flame by night-or probably that light reflected from below which is often mistaken for flame in volcanic eruptions-have been seen again and again above the crater; and the awful earthquake of 1843 proves that his capacity for mischief is unabated.

Souffrière entirely free from cloud. The lower, wider, and more ancient crater was generally clear; but out of the midst of it rose a second cone buried in darkness and mist. Once only we caught sight of part of its lip, and the spectacle was one not to be forgotten. The sun was rising behind the hills. The purple mountain was backed by clear blue sky. High above it hung sheets of orange cloud lighted from underneath; lower down, and close upon the hilltops, curved sheets of bright white mist, and under them, again, the crater wreathed with gray vapor, among which, at one moment, we could discern portions of its lip; not smooth, like that of Vesuvius, but broken into awful peaks and chasms hundreds of feet in height. As the sun rose, level lights of golden green streamed round the peak right and left over the downs; but only for a while. As the sky-clouds vanished in his blazing rays, earth-clouds rolled up below from the valleys behind; wreathed and wel-Lucia, the tourist was anxious to obtain tered about the great black teeth of the cra- specimens of that abominable reptile, the ter; and then, sinking among them and be- fer-de-lance, or rat-tailed snake, which is low them, shrouded the whole cone in pur- the pest of this island, as well as of the neighple darkness for the day; while in the fore- boring island of Martinique. In Great Marground blazed in the sunshine broad slopes tinique-so the French say-it is dangerous of cane-field; below them again the town, to travel through certain woodlands on acwith handsome houses and old-fashioned count of this reptile, who lies along a bough, churches and convents, dating possibly from and strikes, without provocation, at horse or the seventeenth century, embowered in man- man. This statement is probably an exaggos, tamarinds, and palmistes; and along geration, as in St. Lucia such is not the case.

Passing southward, and landing at St.

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The snake attacks no oftener than other venomous snakes-that is, when trodden on or when his retreat is cut off. At all events, it seems easy enough to kill him. These ferde-lances are a great pest in St. Lucia, and it is said that as many as thirty of them were killed in clearing a small piece of land near Government House. The present Lieutenant-Governor has offered a small reward for the head of every rat-tailed snake killed; and the number brought in the first month was almost incredible. Certainly it was high time to make a crusade against these unwelcome denizens. According to a government report, nineteen persons were killed by them in one small parish in the year 1849; and the death, though by no means certain, is, when it befalls, a hideous death enough.

It is a singular fact that this snake, so fatal to man, has no power against another West Indian snake, almost equally common, namely, the cribo. This brave animal, closely connected with the common water-snake, is perfectly harmless, and a welcome guest in West Indian houses, because he clears them of rats. He is some six or eight feet long, black, with more or less bright yellow about the tail and under the stomach. He not only faces the fer-de-lance, who is often as big as he, but kills and eats him. It was but recently that the population of Carenage turned out to see a fight in a tree between a cribo and a fer-de-lance, of about

equal size, which, after a two hours' struggle, ended in the cribo swallowing the ferde-lance head foremost. But when he had got his adversary about one-third down, the Creoles, seeing that all the sport was over, rewarded the brave cribo by killing both, and preserving them as a curiosity in spirits.

Among all these islands St. Lucia may be classed as one of the most beautiful; not on account of the size or form of its central mass, which is surpassed by that of several others, but on account of those two extraor dinary mountains at its southwestern end, which, while all conical hills in the French islands are called pitons, bear the name of The Pitons par excellence. From most elevated points in the island their twin peaks may be seen jutting up over the other hills, like, according to irreverent sailors, the tips of a donkey's ears. But as the steamer runs southward along the shore these two peaks open out, and you find yourself in deep water close to the base of two obelisks rather than mountains, which rise sheer out of the sea, one to the height of 2710, the other to that of 2680 feet, about a mile from each other. Between them is the loveliest little bay; and behind them green wooded slopes rise toward the rearward mountain of the Souffrière. The whole glitters clear and keen in blazing sunshine; but behind, black depths of cloud and gray sheets of rain shroud all the central highlands in mystery

and sadness. Beyond them, without a shore, | ing and exporting much stock, the former spreads the open sea. At the back of these much provisions, and both troubling themtwo Pitons is the Souffrière, probably the re-selves less than of yore with sugar and cotmains of the old crater, now fallen in, and ton. only 1000 feet above the sea.

The next link in the chain, as the steamer runs southward, is St. Vincent; a single volcanic peak, like St. Kitt's or the Basse Terre of Guadeloupe. After passing St. Vincent the course lies along the shores of The Grenadines. For sixty miles long low islands of quaint forms and euphonious namesBecquia, Mnstique, Canonau, Carriacou, Isle de Rhone-rise a few hundred feet out of the unfathomable sea, bare of wood, edged with cliffs and streaks of red and gray rock. Their number is counted at three hundred. The largest of them all is not 8000 acres in extent; the smallest about 600. A quiet prosperous race of little yeomen, besides a a few planters, dwell there; the latter feed

At last Trinidad, which is the southern termination of this chain of islands, appeared as a long line of coast, generally level with the water's edge, and green with mangroves or dotted with cocoa-palms; and the blue sea, stained by the outpouring waters of, the Orinoco, changed to a foul bottlegreen. There was South America. As the steamer stopped at last in Port of Spain, her screw whirled up from the bottom clouds of yellow mud, the mingled deposits of the Carony and the Orinoco.

Port of Spain, like most tropical cities, consists of straight, level streets, lines of low houses with no pretension to architectural beauty, evil smells of all descriptions, swarms of dogs, vultures, chickens, and goats,

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and multitudes of people who are doing beings in Port of Spain alone without visinothing. There are said to be 8000 human ble means of subsistence, and you congratu

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late the city on being such an Elysium that people can live there-not without eating, for every person you pass is eating something or other all day long-but without working. The fact is that though these natives will eat as much and more than a European, if they can get it, they can do well without food, and feed, as do the Lazzaroni, on mere heat and light. The best substitute for a dinner is a sleep under a south wall in the blazing sun; and there are plenty of south walls in Port of Spain.

But one turns from the disgusting sights of the common street to feast his eyes on the luxuriant paradise of flowers and fruits in which the whole city is embowered. Bignonias, roses, jasmine, and all varieties of flowering shrubs and vines creep and scramble over every thing, and on every side rise the palms, towering above the lower growths, breaking through and, as it were, defying the soft-rounded forms of the broad-leaved vegeta

tion by the stern grace of their simple lines; the immovable pillar-stem looking the more immovable beneath the toss and lash and flicker of the long leaves as they awake out of their sunlit sleep, and rage impatiently for a while before the mountain gusts, and fall asleep again. Like a Greek statue in a luxurious drawing-room, sharp cut, cold, virginal; shaming, by the grandeur of mere form, the voluptuousness of mere color; so stands the palm; a thing to be worshiped rather than to be loved.

The Botanic Gardens of Port of Spain are a perfect wilderness of vegetable wonders. Palms from every quarter of the tropics are grouped together in picturesque arrangement; palms with smooth stems, or with prickly ones, with fan leaves, feather leaves, leaves (as in the wine-palm) like Venus's-hair fern; some, again, like the cocorite, almost stemless, rising in a huge ostrich plume, which tosses in the land breeze, till the long, stiff leaflets seem to whirl like the spokes of a green glass wheel.

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head, in the topmost boughs, noisy paroquets scream and chatter all day long.

Strange, indeed, is the music caused by the clashing together of these huge leaves. The islands of the Bocas, or Boca de They creak and rattle sadly in the wind, as Monos, as they were called by the ancient if perpetually mourning some lost treasure. Spaniards, in honor of a race of monkeys Here, also, may be found great tamarind-long since extinct, are situated at a short trees, and the sandbox, whose dried seed-distance from Trinidad, and thither went vessels explode with a noise like the firing Mr. Kingsley to see tropical coast scenery,. of a pistol. Every where swarm butterflies and to get, if possible, some guacharo birds of every hue, wasps and bees, black and (pronounced huáchǎro). brown and steel-blue, building their delicate nests in every corner. Ants' nests, too, hang from the boughs, looking like huge hard lumps of clay. Lizards run about the walks in plenty, or stretch themselves along the branches in the sun; and high over your

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These islands are of a peculiar geological formation, worthy the attention of the scientific traveler. On approaching the first group they appear like isolated remnants of limestone, the biggest perhaps one hundred yards long by one hundred feet high, channeled and honey-combed into strange shapes by rain and waves. They are covered almost exclusively by matapalos, which seemed to have strangled the original trees and established themselves in every cranny of the rocks, sending out arms, legs, fingers, ropes, pillars, and what not of live holdfasts over every rock and over each other, till little but the ubiquitous seguine and penguins find room or sustenance among them.

A little farther on is a group of larger Bocas, three in number. In an exquisite little land-locked cove the travelers beached their boat, and sat down beneath the amber shade of the palms to enjoy the scene of natural beauty and repose. Right and left were steep rocks wooded down almost to the sea, and worn into black caves and crannies, festooned with the night-blowing cereus, which crawls about with hairy green legs, like a tangle of giant spiders.

Scattered all about on the shingle were strange shells, bits of coral, cocoa-nuts and their fragments, the round scaly fruit of the Mauritia palm, which had probably floated across the gulf from the forests of the Ori

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