nightcaps are so smart that I wear them all day, for to tell the truth
I really think I look better in my nightcap than in my bonnet, and as
I am surrounded by men who do not know a nightcap from a daycap, it is
no matter what I do." Dear little thing! I am sure she looked too
sweet in them. They sailed from Cork on June 5, and reached Barbados
on July 17, which seems a quick voyage. They stayed one night at an
inn in Bridgetown, and gave a dinner-party for which the bill was over
sixty pounds. This strikes quite a modern note, and might really have
been in post-war days instead of in 1801.

Lady Nugent found the society in Jamaica, both that of officials and
of planters and their wives, intensely uncongenial to her. "Nothing is
ever talked of in this horrid island but the price of sugar. The only
other topics of conversation are debt, disease and death." She was
much shocked at the low standard of morality prevailing amongst the
white men in the colony, and disgusted at the perpetual gormandising
and drunkenness. The frequent deaths from yellow fever amongst her
acquaintance, and the terrible rapidity with which Yellow Jack slew,
depressed her dreadfully, and she was startled at the callous fashion
in which people, hardened by many years' experience of the scourge,
received the news of the death of their most intimate friends. She was
perpetually complaining of the unbearable heat, to which she never got
acclimatised; she suffered "sadly" from the mosquitoes, and never
could get used to earthquakes, hurricanes, or scorpions.

With these exceptions, she seems to have liked Jamaica very well. It
must have been an extraordinary community, and to understand it we
must remember the conditions prevailing. Bryan Edwards, in his
_History of the British West Indies_, published in 1793, called
them "the principal source of the national opulence and maritime power