freshness, and peace and cheerfulness, such as is stirred up by
certain views of the Mediterranean and its shores; only broken by
one ghastly sight--the lonely mast of the ill-fated Rhone, standing
up still where she sank with all her crew, in the hurricane of 1867.

At length, in the afternoon, we neared the last point, and turning
inside an isolated and crumbling hummock, the Dutchman's Cap, saw
before us, at the head of a little narrow harbour, the scarlet and
purple roofs of St. Thomas's, piled up among orange-trees, at the
foot of a green corrie, or rather couple of corries, some eight
hundred feet high. There it was, as veritable a Dutch-oven for
cooking fever in, with as veritable a dripping-pan for the poison
when concocted in the tideless basin below the town, as man ever
invented. And we were not sorry when the superintendent, coming on
board, bade us steam back again out of the port, and round a certain
Water-island, at the back of which is a second and healthier
harbour, the Gri-gri channel. In the port close to the town we
could discern another token of the late famous hurricane, the
funnels and masts of the hapless Columbia, which lies still on the
top of the sunken floating clock, immovable, as yet, by the art of
man.

But some hundred yards on our right was a low cliff, which was even
more interesting to some of us than either the town or the wreck;
for it was covered with the first tropic vegetation which we had
ever seen. Already on a sandy beach outside, we had caught sight of
unmistakable coconut trees; some of them, however, dying, dead, even
snapped short off, either by the force of the hurricane, or by the
ravages of the beetle, which seems minded of late years to
exterminate the coconut throughout the West Indies; belonging, we