O'er the reef, like thunder crashing,
Blow thou brave old Trade wind, blow!"

One can almost hear the great seas thundering on the coral reefs in
reading these lines, and can see in imagination the nodding cocoanut
palms bending their pliant green heads to the life-giving Trades.

It is curious the different terms used for these continuous winds: we
call them "Trade winds"; the French, "Vents alizes"; the Germans,
"Passatwinde"; the Spanish "Vientos generates." All quite different.

As my nephew and I drove out of the dock enclosure at Kingston, we
were appalled at the scene of desolation that met our eyes. Kingston
was one heap of ruins; there was not a house intact. Neither of us had
imagined the possibility of a town being so completely destroyed, for
this was in 1907, not 1915, and twenty brief seconds had sufficed to
wreck a prosperous city of 40,000 inhabitants. The streets had been
partially cleared, but the telephone and the electric-light wires were
all down, as were the overhead wires for the trolly-cars. We traversed
three miles of shapeless heaps of bricks and stones. Some trim
well-kept villas in the suburbs which I remembered well, were either
shaken down, or gaped on the road through broad fissures in their
frontages, great piles of debris announcing that the building was
only, so to speak, standing on sufferance, and would have to be
entirely reconstructed. On arriving at King's House, we found the main
building still standing, but so damaged that it might collapse at any
moment, and therefore uninhabitable. The handsome ballroom, which
formed a separate wing, was nothing but a pile of rubbish, a formless
mass of bricks and plaster. The dining-room, making the corresponding
wing, was built entirely of wood, and had consequently escaped injury.