small ones do instead. While I was there a man came to report that he
had slipped by accident and set a stone rolling; the stone had cut a
water pipe in two, and it had to be mended, and was an afternoon's work
for somebody. Such officers as have no resources in themselves are, of
course, bored to extinction. There is neither furred game to hunt nor
feathered game to shoot; the mongoose has eaten up the partridges. I
suggested that they should import two or three couple of bears from
Norway; they would fatten and multiply among the roots and sugar canes,
with a black piccaninny now and then for a special delicacy. One of the
party extemporised us a speech which would be made on the occasion in
Exeter Hall.

We had not seen the worst of the weather. As we mounted to ride back the
fog changed to rain, and the rain to a deluge. The track became a
torrent. Macintoshes were a vanity, for the water rushed down one's
neck, and every crease made itself into a conduit carrying the stream
among one's inner garments. Dominica itself had not prepared me for the
violence of these Jamaican downpourings. False had proved our prophet
down below. There was no help for it but to go on; and we knew by
experience that one does not melt on these occasions. At a turn of the
road we met another group of riders, among them Lady N----, who, during
her husband's absence in England, was living at a country house in the
hills. She politely stopped and would have spoken, but it was not
weather to stand talking in; the torrent washed us apart.

And now comes the strangest part of the story. A thousand feet down we
passed out below the clouds into clear bright sunshine. Above us it was
still black as ever. The vapour clung about the peaks and did not leave
them. Underneath us and round us it was a lovely summer's day. The
farther we descended the fewer the signs that any rain had fallen. When
we reached the stables at Gordon's Town, the dust was on the road as we
left it, and the horsekeeper congratulated us on the correctness of his
forecast. Clothes soon dry in that country, and we drove down home none
the worse for our wetting. I was glad to have seen a place of which I
had heard so much. On the whole, I hoped that perhaps by-and-by the
authorities may discover some camping ground for our poor soldiers
halfway between the Inferno of Fort Augusta and the Caucasian cliffs to
which they are chained like Prometheus. Malice did say that Newcastle
was