of their oars was seen.

Most weird and fantastic are these nightly visits to West Indian
harbours. Above, the black mountain-depths, with their canopy of
cloud, bright white against the purple night, hung with keen stars.
The moon, it may be on her back in the west, sinking like a golden
goblet behind some rock-fort, half shrouded in black trees. Below,
a line of bright mist over a swamp, with the coco-palms standing up
through it, dark, and yet glistering in the moon. A light here and
there in a house: another here and there in a vessel, unseen in the
dark. The echo of the gun from hill to hill. Wild voices from
shore and sea. The snorting of the steamer, the rattling of the
chain through the hawse-hole; and on deck, and under the quarter,
strange gleams of red light amid pitchy darkness, from engines,
galley fires, lanthorns; and black folk and white folk flitting
restlessly across them.

The strangest show: 'like a thing in a play,' says every one when
they see it for the first time. And when at the gun-fire one
tumbles out of one's berth, and up on deck, to see the new island,
one has need to rub one's eyes, and pinch oneself--as I was minded
to do again and again during the next few weeks--to make sure that
it is not all a dream. It is always worth the trouble, meanwhile,
to tumble up on deck, not merely for the show, but for the episodes
of West Indian life and manners, which, quaint enough by day, are
sure to be even more quaint at night, in the confusion and bustle of
the darkness. One such I witnessed in that same harbour of Grenada,
not easily to be forgotten.

A tall and very handsome middle-aged brown woman, in a limp print