stack of rock, which is said to have been joined to the mainland in
the memory of the fathers of this generation; and on shore,
composed, I am told, of the same rock, that hill of San Fernando
which forms a beacon by sea and land for many a mile around. An
isolated boss of the older Parian, composed of hardened clay which
has escaped destruction, it rises, though not a mile long and a
third of a mile broad, steeply to a height of nearly six hundred
feet, carrying on its cliffs the remains of a once magnificent
vegetation. Now its sides are quarried for the only road-stone met
with for miles around; cultivated for pasture, in which the round-
headed mango-trees grow about like oaks at home; or terraced for
villas and gardens, the charm of which cannot be told in words. All
round it, rich sugar estates spread out, with the noble Palmistes
left standing here and there along the roads and terraces; and
everywhere is activity and high cultivation, under the
superintendence of gentlemen who are prospering, because they
deserve to prosper.

Between the cliff and the shore nestles the gay and growing little
town, which was, when we took the island in 1795, only a group of
huts. In it I noted only one thing which looked unpleasant. The
negro houses, however roomy and comfortable, and however rich the
gardens which surrounded them, were mostly patched together out of
the most heterogeneous and wretched scraps of wood; and on inquiry I
found that the materials were, in most cases, stolen; that when a
Negro wanted to build a house, instead of buying the materials, he
pilfered a board here, a stick there, a nail somewhere else, a lock
or a clamp in a fourth place, about the sugar-estates, regardless of
the serious injury which he caused to working buildings; and when he
had gathered a sufficient pile, hidden safely away behind his
neighbour's house, the new hut rose as if by magic. This continual
pilfering, I was assured, was a serious tax on the cultivation of
the estates around. But I was told, too, frankly enough, by the
very gentleman who complained, that this habit was simply an
heirloom from the bad days of slavery, when the pilfering of the
slaves from other estates was connived at by their own masters, on
the ground that if A's Negroes robbed B, B's Negroes robbed C, and
so all round the alphabet; one more evil instance of the
demoralising effect of a state of things which, wrong