sombre blues and grays are commoner than pinks, yellows, and
violets. Occasionally you observe a fine half-breed type--some
tall brown girl walking by with a swaying grace like that of a
sloop at sea;--but such spectacles are not frequent. Most of
those you meet are black or a blackish brown. Many stores are
kept by yellow men with intensely black hair and eyes,--men who
do not smile. These are Portuguese. There are some few fine
buildings; but the most pleasing sight the little town can offer
the visitor is the pretty Botanical Garden, with its banyans and
its palms, its monstrous lilies and extraordinary fruit-trees,
and its beautiful little mountains. From some of these trees a
peculiar tillandsia streams down, much like our Spanish moss,--but
it is black!

... As we move away southwardly, the receding outlines of the
island look more and more volcanic. A chain of hills and cones,
all very green, and connected by strips of valley-land so low
that the edge of the sea-circle on the other side of the island
can be seen through the gaps. We steam past truncated hills, past
heights that have the look of the stumps of peaks cut half down,
--ancient fire-mouths choked by tropical verdure.

Southward, above and beyond the deep-green chain, tower other
volcanic forms,--very far away, and so pale-gray as to seem like
clouds. Those are the heights of Nevis,--another creation of the
subterranean fires.

It draws nearer, floats steadily into definition: a great
mountain flanked by two small ones; three summits; the loftiest,
with clouds packed high upon it, still seems to smoke;--the