The legislature has passed an act for building a church in Becquia and two more in St. Vincent's, and I trust that this act will not be allowed to fall asleep as some others of the sort have done. Some reformations of importance are wanted in this island, and those planters, who are wise to their own interests, will see that they are executed. They must not legislate any more for England; for England has a long glass now and can make out objects by night or by day. By themselves will they and all the planters stand, and by themselves will they fall, if to fall be their lot.

that no respectable person had any hand in this affair, the obvious disinclination amongst the authorities of the island to investigate the matter with energy, renders them all justly obnoxious to the charge of being accessaries after the fact.

ST. LUCIA *.

ALL Monday night and Tuesday morning of the 12th of April, we were becalmed under the mighty shadow of the Soufrière, which is the north-western extremity of St. Vincent's. It is a magnificent mountain with deep clefts and gullies in its sides, and the summit is only seen at intervals, between the rolling clouds. How still and motionless it seemed, and what a contrast it presented to itself on the awful night of the first of May 1812, a night much to be remembered in the West Indies, and the tale whereof will remain as a nursery treasure to generations that are to be born hereafter!

The wind freshened as soon as we had slowly escaped the lee of the land, and carried us gaily along till we made the mountains of St. Lucia. The first approach to this island from the south offers the most striking combination of various kinds of scenery that I have ever seen. Two rocks, which the Gods call Pitons and men Sugar-loaves,

* S. Alousia in Davies

rise perpendicularly out of the sea and shoot to a great height in parallel cones, which taper away towards the summit like the famous spires of Coventry. These rocks, which are feathered from the clouds to the waves with evergreen foliage, stand like pillars of Hercules on either side of the entrance into a small but deep and beautiful bay. A pretty little village or plantation appears at the bottom of the cove; the sandy beach stretches like a line of silver round the blue water, and the cane fields form a broad belt of vivid green in the back ground. Behind this the mountains, which run north and south throughout the island, rise in the most fantastic shapes, here cloven into steep-down chasms, there darting into arrowy points, and every where shrouded or swathed, as it were, in wood, which the hand of man will probably never lay low. The clouds, which within the tropics are infallibly attracted by any woody eminences, contribute greatly to the wildness of the scene; sometimes they are so dense as to bury the mountains in darkness; at other times they float transparently like a silken veil; frequently the flaws from the gulleys perforate the vapors and make windows in the smoky mass, and then again the wind and the sun will cause the whole to be drawn upwards majestically like the curtain of a gorgeous theatre.

But beautiful as these sierras look, it is woe to the man who ventures on foot to penetrate their recesses. Even on horseback it is sometimes perilous to traverse the forest by the alleys which have been opened: for there and in old and ill-kept rooms snakes and wood-slaves love to dwell, and the natives tell direful stories about the poison of the first and the tenacity of the second. However I never met with any person who had known an instance of the wood-slave fixing itself upon a human being, though every body seemed to believe the story. The animal is a broad and flat-headed lizard, and of a dull gray color. The negros have a particular aversion to them from a notion that contact with them will produce leprosy. It is said that three English sailors, having heard that the western Piton was inaccessible, determined on that account to climb to the top of it. Two of them were never seen again; the third reached the summit, planted an old Union Jack in the ground, and instantly fell in mortal convulsions by its side. There was no doubt that they perished by the bites of snakes.

A steady breeze from S.S.E. wafted us along within a mile's distance from the shore till we passed the point of the Vigie, when we made a short tack and cast anchor at the mouth of the

Carenage about six in the evening. Nothing could

be more delightful than this run. As we stood on the deck of the moving ship, the objects on the coast changed before us like the scenery in a diorama, and their variety and quick transition were particularly grateful to the eye, fatigued with the monotony of the ocean. The back ground continued woody and mountainous, as I have described it before, but every three or four miles we opened the most lovely little coves and bays I ever saw in my life. At the bottom of two of the largest of these were considerable villages with five or six large merchantmen lying at anchor, and the smallest of them were fringed with fields of green canes, and enlivened with the decent mansion of the proprietor, the cottages for the negros, and one or two droghers taking in their cargo from the plantation for some larger vessel at Castries or elsewhere. I was much amused too with a flotilla of fishing or passage boats, which, as we were going rapidly in a contrary direction, shot by us like lightning. These boats are very long, narrow and light, having two and even sometimes three masts upon which they carry so much sail that the men are obliged to sit on the weather bulwarks to keep them from oversetting. No regatta in England ever witnessed such desperate sailing, and when it