sets heavily, curling
over a long coral reef which forms a partial shelter. The mountain range
rose behind, sloping off into rounded woody hills. Here were the feeding
grounds of the herds of wild cattle which tempted the buccaneers into
the island, and from which they took their name. The shore was abrupt;
the land broke off in cliffs of coral rock tinted brilliantly with
various colours. One rather striking white-cliff, a ship's officer
assured me, was chalk; adding flint when I looked incredulous. His
geological education was imperfect. We brought up a mile outside the
black city. The boat was lowered. None of the other passengers
volunteered to go with me; the English are out of favour in Hayti just
now; the captain discouraged landings out of mere curiosity; and,
indeed, the officer with the mails had to reassure himself of Captain
W----'s consent before he would take me. The presence of Europeans in
any form is barely tolerated. A few only are allowed to remain about the
ports, just as the Irish say they let a few Danes remain in Dublin and
Waterford after the battle of Clontarf, to attend to the ignoble
business of trade.

The country after the green of the Antilles looked brown and parched. In
the large islands the winter months are dry. As we approached the reef
we saw the long hills of water turn to emerald as they rolled up the
shoal, then combing and breaking in cataracts of snow-white foam. The
officer in charge took me within oar's length of the rock to try my
nerves, and the sea, he did not fail to tell me, swarmed with sharks of
the worst propensities. Two steamers were lying inside, one of which,
belonging to an English company, had 'happened a misfortune,' and was
breaking up as a deserted wreck. A Yankee clipper schooner had just come
in with salt fish and crackers--a singularly beautiful vessel, with
immense beam, which would have startled the builders of the Cowes
racers. It was precisely like the schooner which Tom Cringle commanded
before the dockyard martinets had improved her into ugliness, built on
the lines of the old pirate craft of the islands, when the lives and
fortunes of men hung on the extra speed, or the point which they could
lie closer to the wind. Her return cargo would be coffee and bananas.

Englishmen move about in Jacmel as if they were ashamed of themselves
among their dusky lords and masters. I observed the Yankee skipper
paddling himself off in a canoe with his broad straw h