been of black satin, probably embroidered; and fit, though somewhat
threadbare, for the thigh of a magistrate and gentleman of Spain.
But he would not have gone on ordinary days in a sansculottic state.
He would have worn that most comfortable of loose nether garments,
which may be seen on sailors in prints of the great war, and which
came in again a while among the cunningest Highland sportsmen,
namely, slops. Let no one laugh, either, at least in contempt, as
the average British Philistine will think himself bound to do, at
the fact that these men had not only no balance at their bankers,
but no bankers with whom to have a balance. No men are more capable
of supporting poverty with content and dignity than the Spaniards of
the old school. For none are more perfect gentlemen, or more free
from the base modern belief that money makes the man; and I doubt
not that a member of the old Cabildo of San Josef in slops was far
better company than an average British Philistine in trousers.

So slumbered on, only awakening to an occasional gentle revolt
against their priests, or the governor sent to them from the Spanish
Court, the good Spaniards of Trinidad; till the peace of 1783 woke
them up, and they found themselves suddenly in a new, and an
unpleasantly lively, world.

Rodney's victories had crippled Spain utterly; and crippled, too,
the French West Indian islands, though not France itself: but the
shrewd eye of a M. Rome de St. Laurent had already seen in Trinidad
a mine of wealth, which might set up again, not the Spanish West
Indians merely, but those of the French West Indians who had
exhausted, as they fancied, by bad cultivation, the soils of
Guadaloupe, Martinique, and St. Lucia. He laid before the Intendant
at Caraccas, on whom Trinidad then depended, a scheme of