That a man in the position of a British resident should have ventured on a statement which, if untrue, would be ruinous to himself, appeared in a high degree improbable. Yet one had to set one incredibility against another. Notwithstanding the character of the evidence, when I went out to the West Indies I was still unbelieving. I could not bring myself to credit that in an island nominally Catholic, where the French language was spoken, and there were cathedrals and churches and priests and missionaries, so horrid a revival of devil-worship could have been really possible. All the inquiries which I had been able to make, from American and other officers who had been in Hayti, confirmed Sir S. St. John's story. I had hardly found a person who entertained a doubt of it. I was perplexed and uncertain, when the Chief Justice opened the subject and asked me what I thought. Had I been convinced I should have turned the conversation, but I was not convinced and I was not afraid to say so. I reminded him of the universal conviction through Europe that the Jews were habitually guilty of sacrificing children also. There had been detailed instances. Alleged offenders had been brought before courts of justice at any time for the last six hundred years. Witnesses had been found to swear to facts which had been accepted as conclusive. Wretched creatures in Henry III.'s time had been dragged by dozens at horses' tails through the streets of London, broken on the wheel, or torn to pieces by infuriated mobs. Even within the last two years, the same accusation had been brought forward in Russia and Germany, and had been established apparently by adequate proof. So far as popular conviction of the guilt of the Jews was an evidence against them, nothing could be stronger; and no charge could be without foundation on ordinary principles of evidence which revived so often and in so many places. And yet many persons, I said, and myself among them, believed that although the accusers were perfectly sincere, the guilt of the Jews was from end to end an hallucination of hatred. I had looked into the particulars of some of the trials. They were like the trials for witchcraft. The belief had created the fact, and accusa

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tion was itself evidence. I was prepared to find these stories of child murder in Hayti were bred similarly of anti-negro prejudice.

Had the Chief Justice caught at my suggestion with any eagerness I should have suspected it myself. His grave diffidence and continued hesitation in offering an opinion confirmed me in my own. I told him that I was going to Hayti to learn what I could on the spot. I could not expect that I, on a flying visit, could see deeper into the truth than Sir Spenser St. John had seen, but at least I should not take with me a mind already made up, and I was not given to credulity. He took leave of me with an expression of passionate anxiety that it might be found possible to remove so black a stain from his unfortunate race.

CHAPTER X.

Leeward and Windward Islands-The Caribs of Dominica-Visit of Père Labat-St. Lucia-The Pitons-The harbour at Castries-Intended coaling station-Visit to the administrator-The old fort and barracks -Conversation with an American-Constitution of Dominica-Land at Roseau.

BEYOND all the West Indian Islands I had been curious to see Dominica. It was the scene of Rodney's great fight on April 12. It was the most beautiful of the Antilles and the least known. A tribe of aboriginal Caribs still lingered in the forests retaining the old look and the old language, and, except that they no longer ate their prisoners, retaining their old habits. They were skilful fishermen, skilful basket makers, skilful in many curious arts.

The island lies between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and is one of the group now called Leeward Islands, as distinguished

1 Not to be confounded with St. Domingo, which is called after St. Domenic, where the Spaniards first settled, and is now divided into the two black republics of St. Domingo and Hayti. Dominica lies in the chain of the Antilles between Martinique and Guadaloupe, and was so named by Columbus because he discovered it on a Sunday.

from St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada, &c., which form the Windward. The early geographers drew the line differently and more rationally. The main direction of the trade winds is from east to west. To them the Windward Islands were the whole chain of the Antilles, which form the eastern side of the Caribbean Sea. The Leeward were the great islands on the west of it-Cuba, St. Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The modern division corresponds to no natural phenomenon. The drift of the trades is rather from the north-east than from the south-east, and the names serve only now to describe our own not very successful political groupings.

Dominica cuts in two the French West Indian possessions. The French took it originally from the Spaniards, occupied it, colonised it, planted in it their religion and their language, and fought desperately to maintain their possession. Lord Rodney, to whom we owe our own position in the West Indies, insisted that Dominica must belong to us to hold the French in check, and regarded it as the most important of all our stations there. Rodney made it English, and English it has ever since remained in spite of the furious efforts which France made to recover an island which she so highly valued during the Napoleon wars. I was anxious to learn what we had made of a place which we had fought so hard for.

Though Dominica is the most mountainous of all the Antilles, it is split into many valleys of exquisite fertility. Through each there runs a full and ample river, swarming with fish, and yielding waterpower enough to drive all the mills which industry could build. In these valleys and on the rich levels along the shore the French had once their cane fields and orange gardens, their pineapple beds and indigo plantations.

Labat, who travelled through the island at the close of the seventeenth century, found it at that time chiefly occupied by Caribs. With his hungry appetite for knowledge, he was a guest in their villages, acquainted himself with their characters and habits, and bribed out of them by lavish presents of brandy the secrets of their medicines and poisons. The Père was a clever, curious man, with a genial human sympathy about him,

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and was indulgent to the faults which the poor coloured sinners fell into from never having known better. He tried to make Christians of them. They were willing to be baptised as often as he liked for a glass of brandy. But he was not very angry when he found that the Christianity went no deeper. Moral virtues, he concluded charitably, could no more be expected out of a Carib than reason and good sense out of a woman.

At Roseau, the capital, he fell in with the then queen of Dominica, a Madame Ouvernard, a Carib of pure blood, who in her time of youth and beauty had been the mistress of an English governor of St. Kitts. When Labat saw her she was a hundred years old with a family of children and grandchildren. She was a grand old lady, unclothed almost absolutely, bent double, so that under ordinary circumstances nothing of her face could be seen. Labat, however, presented her with a couple of bottles of eau de vie, under the influence of which she lifted up to him a pair of still brilliant eyes and a fair mouthful of teeth. They did very well together, and on parting they exchanged presents in Homeric fashion, she loading him with baskets of fruit, he giving a box in return full of pins and needles, knives and scissors.

Labat was a student of languages before philology had become a science. He discovered from the language of the Caribs that they were North American Indians. They called themselves Banari, which meant come from over sea.' Their dialect was almost identical with what he had heard spoken in Florida. They were cannibals, but of a peculiar kind. Human flesh was not their ordinary food; but they 'boucanned' or dried the limbs of distinguished enemies whom they had killed in battle, and handed them round to be gnawed at special festivals. They were a light-hearted, pleasant race, capital shots with bows and arrows, and ready to do anything he asked in return for brandy. They killed a hammer shark for his amusement by diving under the monster and stabbing him with knives. As to their religion, they had no objection to anything. But their real belief was in a sort of devil.

Soon after Labat's visit the French came in, drove the

Caribs into the mountains, introduced negro slaves, and an

ordered form of society. Madame Ouvernard and her court went to their own place. Canes were planted, and indigo and coffee. A cathedral was built at Roseau, and parish churches were scattered about the island. There were convents of nuns and houses of friars, and a fort at the port with a garrison in it. The French might have been there till now had not we turned them out some ninety years ago; English enterprise then setting in that direction under the impulse of Rodney's victories. I was myself about to see the improvements which we had introduced into an acquisition which had cost us so dear.

I was to be dropped at Roseau by the mail steamer from Barbadoes to St. Thomas's. On our way we touched at St. Lucia, another once famous possession of ours. This island was once French also. Rodney took it in 1778. It was the only one of the Antilles which was left to us in the reverses which followed the capitulation of York Town. It was in the harbour at Castries, the chief port, that Rodney collected the fleet which fought and won the great battle with the Count de Grasse. At the peace of Versailles, St. Lucia was restored to France; but was retaken in 1796 by Sir Ralph Abercrombie, and, like Dominica, has ever since. belonged to England. This, too, is a beautiful mountainous island, twice as large as Barbadoes, in which even at this late day we have suddenly discovered that we have an interest. The threatened Darien canal has awakened us to a sense that we require a fortified coaling station in those quarters. St. Lucia has the greatest natural advantages for such a purpose, and works are already in progress there, and the long-deserted forts and barracks which had been made over to snakes and lizards, are again to be occupied by English troops.

We sailed one evening from Barbadoes. In the grey of the next morning we were in the passage between St. Lucia and St. Vincent just under the 'Pitons,' which were soaring