physiognomy of volcanoes: their ribbed sides must be lava under
that verdure. Out of sight westward--in successions of bright
green, pale green, bluish-green, and vapory gray-stretches a long
chain of crater shapes. Truncated, jagged, or rounded, all these
elevations are interunited by their curving hollows of land or by
filaments--very low valleys. And as they grade away in varying
color through distance, these hill-chains take a curious
segmented, jointed appearance, like insect forms, enormous ant-
bodies.... This is St. Kitt's.

We row ashore over a tossing dark-blue water, and leaving the long
wharf, pass under a great arch and over a sort of bridge into the
town of Basse-Terre, through a concourse of brown and black people.

It is very tropical-looking; but more sombre than Frederiksted.
There are palms everywhere,--cocoa, fan, and cabbage palms; many
bread-fruit trees, tamarinds, bananas, Indian fig-trees, mangoes,
and unfamiliar things the negroes call by incomprehensible
names,--"sap-saps," "dhool-dhools." But there is less color, less
reflection of light than in Santa Cruz; there is less quaintness;
no Spanish buildings, no canary-colored arcades. All the narrow
streets are gray or neutral-tinted; the ground has a dark ashen
tone. Most of the dwellings are timber, resting on brick props,
or elevated upon blocks of lava rock. It seems almost as if some
breath from the enormous and always clouded mountain overlooking
the town had begrimed everything, darkening even the colors of
vegetation.

The population is not picturesque. The costumes are
commonplace; the tints of the women's attire are dull. Browns and