e batteries manned; but the cannonade died
away, and all went to bed in wonder. On the 1st of May the clocks struck
six, but the sun did not, as usual in the tropics, answer to the call.
The darkness was still intense, and grew more intense as the morning
wore on. A slow and silent rain of impalpable dust was falling over the
whole island. The negroes rushed shrieking into the streets. Surely the
last day was come. The white folk caught (and little blame to them) the
panic, and some began to pray who had not prayed for years. The pious
and the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbados) were not
proof against the infection. Old letters describe the scene in the
churches that morning as hideous--prayers, sobs, and cries, in Stygian
darkness, from trembling crowds. And still the darkness continued and
the dust fell.

INCIDENTS AT BARBADOS

"I have a letter written by one long since dead, who had at least powers
of description of no common order, telling how, when he tried to go out
of his house upon the east coast, he could not find the trees on his own
lawn save by feeling for their stems. He stood amazed not only in utter
darkness, but in utter silence; for the trade-wind had fallen dead,
the everlasting roar of the surf was gone, and the only noise was the
crashing of branches, snapped by the weight of the clammy dust. He went
in again, and waited. About one o'clock the veil began to lift; a
lurid sunlight stared in from the horizon, but all was black overhead.
Gradually the dust drifted away; the island saw the sun once more, and
saw itself inches deep in black, and in this case fertilizing, dust. The
trade-wind blew suddenly once more out of the clear east, and the surf
roared again along the shore.

"Meanwhile a heavy earthquake-wave had struck part at least of the
shores of Barbados. The gentleman on the east coast, going out, found
traces of the sea, and boats and logs washed up some ten to twenty feet
above high-tide mark; a convulsion which seemed to have gone unmarked
during the general dismay.

"One man at least, an old friend of John Hunter, Sir Joseph Banks and
others their compeers, was above the dismay, and the superstitious panic
which accompanied it. Finding it still dark when he rose to dress, he
opened (so the story used to run) his window; found it stick, and felt
upon the sill a coat of soft powder. 'The volcano in St. Vincent has
broken out at last,' said the wise man, 'and this is