xample of Hayti ought to suggest misgivings to the most ardent
philonegro enthusiast.

West Indian cookery was famous over the world. Pere Labat devotes at
least a thousand pages to the dishes compounded of the spices and fruits
of the islands, and their fish and fowl. Carib tradition was developed
by artists from London and Paris. The Caribs, according to Labat, only
ate one another for ceremony and on state occasions; their common diet
was as excellent as it was innocent; and they had ascertained by careful
experience the culinary and medicinal virtues of every animal and plant
around them. Tom Cringle is eloquent on the same subject, but with less
scientific knowledge. My own unfortunately is less than his, and I can
do no justice at all to Sir Graham's entertainment of me; I can but say
that he treated me to a West Indian banquet of the old sort, infinite in
variety, and with subtle differences of flavour for which no language
provides names. The wine--laid up _consule Planco_, when Pitt was prime
minister, and the days of liberty as yet were not--was as admirable as
the dishes, and the fruit more exquisite than either. Such pineapples,
such shaddocks, I had never tasted before, and shall never taste again.

Hospitable, generous, splendid as was Sir Graham's reception of me, it
was nevertheless easy to see that the prospects of the island sat heavy
upon him. We had a long conversation when breakfast was over, which, if
it added nothing new to what I had heard before, deepened and widened
the impression of it.

The English West Indies, like other parts of the world, are going
through a silent revolution. Elsewhere the revolution, as we hope, is a
transition state, a new birth; a passing away of what is old and worn
out, that a fresh and healthier order may rise in its place. In the West
Indies the most sanguine of mortals will find it difficult to entertain
any such hope at all. We have been a ruling power there for two hundred
and fifty years; the whites whom we planted as our representatives are
drifting into helplessness, and they regard England and England's policy
as the principal cause of it. The blacks whom, in a fit of virtuous
benevolence, we emancipated, do not feel that they are particularly
obliged to us. They think, if they think at all, that they were ill
treated originally, and have received no more than was due to them, and
that perhaps it was not benevolence at all on our part, but a desire to
free