very provision to make life pass deliciously. To walk
is difficult in a damp steamy temperature hotter during daylight than
the hottest forcing house in Kew. I was warned not to exert myself and
to take cocktail freely. In the evening I might venture out with the
bats and take a drive if I wished in the twilight. Languidly charming as
it all was, I could not help asking myself of what use such a possession
could be either to England or the English nation. We could not colonise
it, could not cultivate it, could not draw a revenue from it. If it
prospered commercially the prosperity would be of French and Spaniards,
mulattoes and blacks, but scarcely, if at all, of my own countrymen. For
here too, as elsewhere, they were growing fewer daily, and those who
remained were looking forward to the day when they could be released. If
it were not for the honour of the thing, as the Irishman said after
being carried in a sedan chair which had no bottom, we might have spared
ourselves so unnecessary a conquest.

Beautiful, however, it was beyond dispute. Before sunset a carriage took
us round the savannah. Tropical human beings, like tropical birds, are
fond of fine colours, especially black human beings, and the park was as
brilliant as Kensington Gardens on a Sunday. At nightfall the scene
became yet more wonderful; air, grass, and trees being alight with
fireflies, each as brilliant as an English glowworm. The palm tree at
our own gate stood like a ghostly sentinel clear against the starry sky,
a single long dead frond hanging from below the coronet of leaves and
clashing against the stem as it was blown to and fro by the night wind,
while long-winged bats swept and whistled over our heads.

The commonplace intrudes upon the imaginative. At moments one can fancy
that the world is an enchanted place after all, but then comes generally
an absurd awakening. On the first night of my arrival, before we went to
bed there came an invitation to me to attend a political meeting which
was to be held in a few days on the savannah. Trinidad is a purely Crown
colony, and has escaped hitherto the introduction of the election virus.
The newspapers and certain busy gentlemen in 'Port of Spain' had
discovered that they were living under 'a degrading tyranny,' and they
demanded a 'constitution.' They did not complain that their affairs had
been ill managed. On the contrary, they insisted that they were the most
prosperous of the West Indian colon