me from my constant reading of Marryat and Michael Scott.

I suppose that every one draws mental pictures of places that they
have constantly heard about, and that most people have noticed how
invariably the real place is not only totally different from the fancy
picture, but almost aggressively so.

I have already mentioned Lady Nugent's journal or "Jamaica in 1801." I
am persuaded that she must have been a most delightful little
creature. She was very tiny, as she tells us herself, and had brown
curly hair. She was a little coy about her age, which she confided to
no one; by her own directions, it was omitted even from her tombstone,
but from internal evidence we know that when her husband, Sir George
Nugent, was appointed Governor of Jamaica on April 1, 1801 (how
sceptical he must have been at first as to the genuineness of this
appointment! One can almost hear him ejaculating "Quite so. You don't
make an April fool of me!"), she was either thirty or thirty-one years
old. Lady Nugent was as great an adept as Mrs. Fairchild, of revered
memory, at composing long prayers, every one of which she enters _in
extenso_ in her diary, but not only was there a delightful note of
feminine coquetry about her, but she also possessed a keen sense of
humour, two engaging attributes in which, I fear, that poor
Mrs. Fairchild was lamentably lacking.

Lady Nugent and her husband sailed out to Jamaica in a man-of-war,
H.M.S. _Ambuscade_, in June, 1801. As Sir George Nugent had been
from 1799 to 1801 Adjutant-General in Ireland, this name must have had
quite a home-like sound to him. We read in Lady Nugent's diary of June
25, 1801, after a lengthy supplication for protection against the
perils of the deep, the following charmingly feminine note: "My