Wednesday, the 15th, was a really tropic day; blazing heat in the
forenoon, with the thermometer at 82 degrees in the shade, and in
the afternoon stifling clouds from the south-west, where a dark band
of rain showed, according to the planters' dictum, showers over the
islands, which we were nearing fast. At noon we were only two
hundred and ten miles from Sombrero, 'the Spanish Hat,' a lonely
island, which is here the first outlier of the New World. We ought
to have passed it by sunrise on the 16th, and by the afternoon
reached St. Thomas's, where our pleasant party would burst like a
shell in all directions, and scatter its fragments about all coasts
and isles--from Demerara to Panama, from Mexico to the Bahamas. So
that day was to the crew a day of hard hot work--of lifting and
sorting goods on the main-deck, in readiness for the arrival at St.
Thomas's, and of moving forwards two huge empty boilers which had
graced our spar-deck, filled with barrels of onions and potatoes,
all the way from Southampton. But in the soft hot evening hours,
time was found for the usual dance on the quarter-deck, with the
band under the awning, and lamps throwing fantastic shadows, and
waltzing couples, and the crew clustering aft to see, while we old
folks looked on, with our 'Ludite dum lubet, pueri,' till the
captain bade the sergeant-at-arms leave the lights burning for an
extra half hour; and 'Sir Roger de Coverley' was danced out, to the
great amusement of the foreigners, at actually half-past eleven.
After which unexampled dissipation, all went off to rest, promising
to themselves and their partners that they would get up at sunrise
to sight Sombrero.

But, as it befell, morning's waking brought only darkness, the heavy
pattering of a tropic shower, and the absence of the everlasting