patience in her voice, "you must let me go now; I am quite tired out. I will write to you to-morrow or next day, as I promised."

She passed him and went on, leaving him unable to utter a word of protest. But she had only gone a few steps when she returned, and held out her hand, and said:

"I hope I have not offended you? It seems that I must offend everybody now; but I am a little tired, Mr. Roscorla."

There was just the least quiver about her lips; and as all this was a profound mystery to him, he fancied he must have tired her out, and he inwardly called himself a brute.

"My dear Wenna," he said, "you have not offended me-you have not really. It is I who must apologize to you. I am so sorry I should have worried you; it was very inconsiderate. Pray take your own time about that letter."

So she went away, and passed round to the other side of the rocks, and came in view of the small winding harbour, and the mill, and the inn. Far away up there, over the cliffs, were the downs on which she had met Harry Trelyon that summer morning, as he rode by, singing in the mere joyousness of youth, and happy and pleased with all the world. She could hear the song he was singing then; she could see the sunlight that was shining on his face. It appeared to her to be long ago. This girl was but eighteen years of age, and yet, as she walked down towards Eglosilyan, there was a weight on her heart that seemed to tell her she was growing old.

And now the western sky was red with the sunset, and the rich light burned along the crests of the hills, on the golden furze, the purple heather, and the deep-coloured rocks. The world seemed all ablaze up there; but down here, as she went by the harbour and crossed over the bridge by the mill, Eglosilyan lay pale and grey in the hollow; and even the great black wheel was silent.

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St. Thomas.

FROM Trebizond, Asia Minor, Turkey, to St. Thomas, Danish Antilles, West Indies, is a distance of one hundred and six geographical degrees of longitude West, and of twenty-four degrees of latitude South; besides some odd minutes, the exact number of which may be determined by reference, say, to Keith Johnston's "Royal Atlas." Not a full third of the circumference of the globe in one direction, and little more than a ninth in the other. But insignificant as these distances may appear on a map, especi ally one of Mercator's delusive projection, they are in reality immense. Their true measurement is not by miles, but by centuries; not by geographical, but by cosmical lines; by those, in fact, that divide the oldest of the Old World from the newest of the New.

With Xenophon and Arrian for its chroniclers, broken Roman sculptures and crumbling Byzantine walls for its memorials, Pontic tombs excavated in its rocks, and the mosque in which Mahomet the Conqueror said his thanksgiving prayer, the Te Deum of Islam, crowning its heights, Trebizond is old enough in all conscience; nor do its wide-trousered, crosslegged shopkeepers, its veiled women, its mangy dogs, and its dark patches of cypress grove over Turkish-lettered tombstones, each inscribed with "He is the Eternal," suggest much idea of change. Indeed, its extreme easterly, that is most out-of-the-way, position in the most unprogressive of all empires, that is Turkey, might alone furnish sufficient warrant that the refuge of the Ten Thousand is in no imminent danger of becoming modernised. Nor is it; my word for the fact.

Sunrise may be never so lovely, but sunset moves us more; and a farewell to the old calls up a deeper response in our nature than a welcome to the young. I have left it, amid the chill grey shades of an April evening, the late almost wintry April of those regions; and I have no wish to see again that still, mist-shrouded line of mountain-cape and dark forest; no desire to climb again that rock-hewn ascent, to tread those roughpaven streets, and receive the obsequious salaams of the wide-robed, bearded inhabitants, who rise up Eastern fashion to greet the official badge as it passes by.

The British lion and unicorn have disappeared from over the door of my little garden-surrounded house; Turkish children, very dirty, I make no doubt (for the laws of ablution do not seem obligatory on the juvenile faithful), play about the entrance. Turkish slippers strew the hall; against the latticed windows of what was once my sitting room, now transformed-a most poetic, most prosaic, thought!—into a Turkish harem

apartment, moon-faced Turkish beauties flatten their lovely noses, as they gaze, if they care to do so, on the grey Byzantine walls of the Comnenian fortress across the opposite ravine. My negro groom, the best gereedplayer in the province, has, I hear, settled down into the quiet proprietor of a small coffee-house by the beach; my Turkoman attendants have transferred the pistols and daggers with which they loved to skewer their voluminous waist-bands to the service of other masters. Town, castle, market-place, inhabitants, house, garden, friends, dependants, all have retreated into the lessening proportions of remote perspective; new figures, new landscapes, thrust them daily further and further off across the gulf of life-long distance and separation. Yet they have each and all of them an abiding place in not ungrateful recollection, and a good wish for the long and undisturbed continuance of their contented stagnation; from the Tatar-eyed, wool-capped driver who lounges purposeless in the miry Meidan beside his crouching camel, to the drowsy pasha who languidly extends a be-ringed hand for the scrap of dirty paper on which is scrawled, for the fiftieth time, the long-unanswered petition. They all belong, more than they themselves know, to the world's great past; and the past, be it what it may, has in it a charm denied to the present. "Say not," vainly preaches the old Chaldæanised rabbi who has assumed the name, but not, if scholars are right, the style and dialect of the Son of David, say not thou what is the cause that the former days were better than these." Why not? most venerable Babylonian. Is it that the former days were

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reality no better than the present, rather worse? That a six-pound franchise is in very fact an improvement, penny papers a gain, and steamengines a blessing? Or is it that the old printingless, steamless, Bright and Gladstoneless times were really the best? and the cry of “God Save King Solomon ! " more to the purpose than the triumphant shout of a Beales and a Beales-led multitude over the demolished railings of Hyde Park? Truly I know not, nor perhaps did either the Hebrew Chaldæan moraliser. Let us take the world as we find it; speed, however regretfully, the parting guest; and get ready a cheerful countenance, as best we may, to greet the coming.

Farewell, then, the Old World, and welcome the New; nay, even the newest of the new, West Indian St. Thomas. No chroniclers need we consult here, for there is next to nothing to chronicle; no voluminous historical records, where there is hardly any history to record. Scarce visited towards the close of his career by Columbus, scornfully abandoned by Spain, that only just condescended to bestow on them from a distance the title of "Virgin," equivalent in this particular instance, I suppose, to "Barren," Islands, these smallest, driest, rockiest of the diminutive, rocky, arid, lesser Antilles remained for a century and a half after the mighty world-seeker had turned away from them wholly untenanted, or at best the chance resting-place of buccaneering adventurers, unannexed by any nationality, unsheltered by any flag. The very Caribs, the questionable authors of some undeciphered scratchings on a sea-side cliff or

two, had left them; and no European, no African, had cared to enter on the abandoned heritage. So late as 1650 St. Thomas lay as unclaimed by any of the respectabilities of the world as Oliver Twist, or Ginx's Baby at the workhouse door-better off, indeed, than those remarkable infants, in that it was already possessed somehow of a name, the identical one that it yet bears; though who conferred on it that distinction has remained an unanswered question in the catechism of history.

At last it was in A.D. 1657-those most sedentary, most erratic of mortals, the Dutch, tentatively anchored their broad-built ships in the best of West Indian harbours, and took possession for their own of the forty square miles of rock in the centre of which that harbour is set like a green-blue turquoise in a rusty iron ring. Ten years Dutch bales lumbered the beach; and Dutch merchant sailors, under an embryo Dutch Government, sat meditative beside. But after much consumption of tobacco, scheedam, and thought in the monotonous contemplation of dried-up bushes and brown rock, the Hollanders came to the conclusion that Java, Ceylon, and the Eastern Indies offered better investments for their painstaking enterprise than the Western; and in 1667 the gallant Batavian tubs sailed slowly but not reluctantly away, just as the semi-piratical flag of St. George and merry England speckled the offing of St. Thomas.

So the island changed masters, and the "oath of British commerce replaced awhile the corresponding guttural expletives of Dutch trade. But the quicker workings of the English brain, the naturally sluggish Teutonic fibre of which is, as no less an authority than Mr. Matthew Arnold assures us, abnormally stimulated into incongruous activity by a lucky aspersion of brisker Celtic blood, required scarce five years to solve the problem that the Batavian intellect had with difficulty accomplished in ten. Like their predecessors, however, the new-comers solved it with a negative a mistaken solution, as subsequent events have proved--and in 1671 the British ensign too fluttered off to larger and more fertile isles.

"Tarde venientibus ossa" is a hemistich not less applicable to the great banquet that Nature spreads before her children, than to the monkish refectory of the middle ages. Thus it was with the West Indies, where the late-arriving Danes, long after the more enterprising first-comers, Spanish, English, and French, had divided among themselves every fleshy tit-bit, were fain to put up with the scraggy virginal bones of the least among the lesser Antilles for their share. Of St. Croix, popularly known as Santa Cruz, an island larger and of better promise than St. Thomas, to the south of which it lies at a distance of about forty miles, these Scandinavian Berserkers-to borrow a flower of nomenclature from popular rhetoric-had indeed already, after a sharp struggle with Spanish and French rivals, taken possession; and now, in 1672, seeing St. Thomas absolutely vacant, and a first-rate harbour, if nothing else, ready to hand, they appropriated the Dutch-and-English-deserted island.

I do not envy the feelings of his Excellency the gallant Iversen when

welcomed as the first Danish governor over forty square miles of volcanic rock by the only surviving inhabitants, the melancholy wood-pigeons and sinister land-crabs, of St. Thomas. Nor do I envy the negro slaves who first toiled at clearing bush and levelling stony ground enough to make space for the diminutive square fort and incipient town of "Charlotte-Amalia.” Let us hope that Mark Tapley's mantle descended by some fortunate anachronism on Danes and Africans alike, and enwrapped them in a double fold of jollity as they took possession of their new isle of Eden in its dark-purple sphere of sea.

Sixty years have passed, and half Danish half Dutch-for the persevering Hollanders had returned to their first love, but this time under the unassuming guise of a trading Brandenburg company-St. Thomas uneventfully carries on its little trade with its wealthier neighbours, besides affording a convenient shelter in its harbour to storm-driven ships, and a place of refit to the damaged victims of the West Indian cyclones. This avowedly perhaps, too, not a little business was done, though less openly, in the wrecking, smuggling, privateering, and buccaneering lines; for besides the principal harbour there is many a deep calm creek and quiet cove in the island where a cargo could be landed, a bargain struck, or a sloop equipped without any need of incurring the troublesome enquiries of "whence and whither," where flags and titles might pass unquestioned, and mutual profit hoodwink the Argus eyes of any over-prying official. And if Frenchmen, Spaniards, or even English suffered by these little transactions, were they not at liberty to go and do likewise on their own account? It was the good old West Indian usage, and international law had not yet found a passage to the Caribbean archipelago. Such were the occupations of merchants and traders; meanwhile other colonists busied themselves with less venturesome pursuits on land, and the scanty soil of St. Thomas was cajoled, by dint of care and hard labour, into yielding a modicum of sugar, though surpassed in this respect by its sister island called of St. John. A narrow arm of sea, so narrow that an Enfield rifle would easily select and reach its victim across the rippling strait, divides or unites the fronting coasts. Each at this time owned a dense slavepopulation, regarded by the comparatively small caste of colonists and planters much as the Israelites of old were by their Egyptian taskmasters, and ruled over by a penal code of more than Pharaonic atrocity. But in 1773 the sight of their own increasing numbers quickened the long-stifled exasperation of the Africans into a hope of revenge, and a revolt was concerted between the bondsmen of either island. Ineffective in St. Thomas, it broke out with deadly result among the wilder mountains of St. John; the little Danish garrison, taken by surprise, was soon cut to pieces, and the island lay at the mercy of the negroes, who, having never experienced any themselves, now showed none. Every house was burnt, every estate ravaged, every white man fled or perished; and through all the bloodstained catalogue which enumerates earth's wrong avenged by wrong, infamous oppression, and mad retaliation, few pages are redder than these.