One man at least, an old friend of John Hunter, Sir Joseph Banks and
others their compeers, was above the dismay, and the superstitious
panic which accompanied it. Finding it still dark when he rose to
dress, he opened (so the story used to run) his window; found it
stick, and felt upon the sill a coat of soft powder. 'The volcano
in St. Vincent has broken out at last,' said the wise man, 'and this
is the dust of it.' So he quieted his household and his Negroes,
lighted his candles, and went to his scientific books, in that
delight, mingled with an awe not the less deep because it is
rational and self-possessed, with which he, like other men of
science, looked at the wonders of this wondrous world.

Those who will recollect that Barbadoes is eighty miles to windward
of St. Vincent, and that a strong breeze from E.N.E. is usually
blowing from the former island to the latter, will be able to
imagine, not to measure, the force of an explosion which must have
blown this dust several miles into the air, above the region of the
trade-wind, whether into a totally calm stratum, or into that still
higher one in which the heated south-west wind is hurrying
continually from the tropics toward the pole. As for the cessation
of the trade-wind itself during the fall of the dust, I leave the
fact to be explained by more learned men: the authority whom I have
quoted leaves no doubt in my mind as to the fact.

On leaving St. Vincent, the track lies past the Grenadines. For
sixty miles, long low islands of quaint forms and euphonious names--
Becquia, Mustique, 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, resembling, says Dr. Davy,