rent manliness and vigour of
the national character. The land of Shakespere, Scott, Burns,
Fielding, Dickens, and Charles Reade is protected against literary
miasmas by the strength of its humour and the sunniness of its
temperament.--R.B.

_In the Hands of Jefferson._

BY EDEN PHILLPOTTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY RONALD GRAY.

-----

It is not difficult to appreciate the recent catastrophe in Oceania,
where the island of Great Sangir was partially smothered by terrific
volcanic and seismic convulsions, when one has visited the Western
Indies.

[Illustration: "WHERE LORD NELSON ENJOYED HIS HONEYMOON."]

Many of these tropic isles probably owe their present isolation, if not
their actual existence, to mighty earthquake throes in remote ages of
terrestrial history beyond the memory of man. But man's memory is not a
very extensive affair, and at best probes the past to the extent of a
mere rind of a few thousand years. For the rest he has to read the word
of God, written in fossil and stone and those wondrous arcana of Nature,
which, each in turn, yields a fragment of the secret of truth to human
intellect.

Regions that have been produced or largely modified by earthquake and
volcanic upheaval may, probably enough, vanish at any moment under like
conditions; and the island of Nevis, hard by St. Christopher, in the
West Indies, strongly suggests a possibility of such disaster. It has
always been the regular rendezvous of hurricanes and earthquakes, and it
consists practically of one vast volcanic mountain which rises abruptly
from the sea and pushes its densely-wooded sides three thousand two
hundred feet into the sky. The crater shows no particularly active
inclination at present, but it is doubtless wide awake and merely
resting, like its volcanic neighbour in St. Christopher, where the
breathing of the dormant giant can be noted through rent and rift. The
Fourth Officer of our steamship "Rhine" assured me, as we approached the
lofty dome of Nevis and gazed upon its fertile acclivities and fringe of
palms, that it would never surprise him upon his rounds to find the
place had altogether disappeared under the Caribbean Sea. He added,
according to his custom, an allusion to Columbus, and explained also
that, in the dead and gone days of Slave Traffic, Nevis was a much more
important spot than it is ever likely to become again. Then, indeed, the
island enjoyed no little prosperity an