hich gives
employment to a considerable number of the inhabitants is the canning
of pineapples, a process which is equivalent to preserving them for
any length of time. One firm on Bay Street, as we were informed,
canned and exported nearly a million of pines in one season, lately;
and another, engaged in the fresh-fruit trade, shipped to the States
fifteen cargoes of pines in one year, besides many thousands of
cocoanuts. These are not all raised in Nassau, but this port is made
the headquarters for collecting and disposing of the fruit grown upon
what are termed the out-islands, as well as marketing the large
product of its own soil. It is but a short drive inland to the
extensive pineapple fields, where the handsome fruit may be seen in
the several stages of growth, varying according to the season of the
year. If intended for exportation, the fruit is gathered green; if for
canning purposes, the riper it is the better. The visitor will also be
impressed by the beauty and grace of the cocoanut trees, their pinnate
leaves often a hundred feet from the ground, notwithstanding the bare
cylindrical stem attains a thickness of only two feet.

The Royal Victoria Hotel, though bearing a loyal name, is kept by an
American, and is a very substantial, capacious building, composed of
native limestone, four stories high, three of which are surrounded by
wide piazzas, which afford the shade so necessary in a land of
perpetual summer. The native stone of which the island is composed is
so soft when first quarried that it can easily be cut or sawed into
any shape desired, but it hardens very rapidly after exposure to the
atmosphere. The hotel will accommodate three hundred guests, and is a
positive necessity for the comfort and prosperity of the place. It was
built and is owned by the British government, who erected it some
twenty-five years since. At the time of our arrival there was gathered
under the lofty Moorish portico of the hotel a most picturesque group
of negroes, of both sexes and of all ages, their ebony faces forming a
strong contrast to the background of well-whitewashed walls. Some of
the women were dressed in neat calico gowns, and wore broad-brimmed
straw hats; some were in rags, hatless, shoeless, and barelegged; some
had high-colored kerchiefs wound turban-like about their woolly heads;
and some wore scarlet shawls, the sight of which would have driven a
Spanish bull raving mad. There were coquettish mulatto girls