sary to defend them from aggression. Mr Grenville, the Governor of Barbados, forthwith issued a proclamation summoning the French settlers to withdraw, and he sent a British frigate to the island to protest against the action taken by by France. These prompt measures had the desired effect: the French Government disowned their Governor's action, and for the moment the colony was withdrawn. Only for a moment, however, for very shortly afterwards the French secretly and unostentatiously re-established their settlement.

Nevertheless, Tobago fell into the hands of the English in 1762, during the war with France that broke out in 1756, and by the treaty, signed in Paris in 1763, it was at last formally declared to be a British island.

Lieutenant Governor was certain Mr Browne, his âme damnée was a Mr Gibbs,-delightfully commonplace names, with a sound British smack about them, and to me they present themselves as wonderfully incongruous figures set ashore thus fortuitously on the shores of that lovely bay which is, as it were, a tiny corner of Paradise.

Later, the Windward Road along which, as men in Tobago tell you to-day with admiring wonder, the Napiers were wont to drive their fourin-hand up hill and down dale headlong into Scarboroughskirted the coast, climbing the promontories and dipping down into the bays for the whole length of this island. Now, in an age less glorious, the road has shrunken to a bridle-path, and following this you come, when some thirty odd miles out from Scarborough, to the landing-place made memorable by the coming of Messrs Browne and Gibbs. As you go, your sturdy island pony climbing up the stiff grades with the agility of a lamplighter and sliding down the steep pitches with all four hoofs together like a monkeyon-a-stick, you pass through bowers of greenery where cocoa under spreading shade-trees is replacing sugar, where cocoanut palms lift their fronds on high, where stately rubbertrees cluster on the banks of streams, and through the villages-packs of negro huts in elaborate dilapidation-surrounded by ragged food-plots. Leaving one village, redolent

of stale fish and other misfortunes, down below, with the yellow sands and the calm sea before it, and the banks of foliage behind, you clamber up the ascent, and as you halt to breathe your pony you look out and down upon the typical Tobagonian view. King's Bay, Pirate's Bay, Bloody Bay, Dead Man's Bay, Englishman's Bay, Man o' War's Bay, it matters not which of the half a hundred indentations wherewith the long coastline of Tobago is scalloped each one of them presents a picture complete in itself, and that picture lives in the memory as the lovely, petulant face which this sunny island presents to the stranger that greets her.

Inshore the line of the main range rises, covered with forest -the " high woods" of the West Indies majestic and wonderful, albeit they lack the tremendous splendour, the mystery, the compelling charm, the brooding melancholy of those dear Malayan woodlands which were for so many years my home. Threading its way among the cocoa nut trees, down in the sandy bays before you and behind, runs the narrow brown thread of bridlepath which, quitting the flat, plunges headlong into masses of greenery and is lost. Again, before you and behind, the bay on either side is enclosed by a bold bluff rising sheer from the sea, the foliage covering it almost to the water's edge, presenting to the blueness of the lapping waves a wonderful contrast of colours. Half-way

out in the bays, perhaps, stand small groups of black rocks, and as you watch, the sea, which all the while lies seemingly motionless, heaves its waters slowly against their dripping sides, and draws them off again in broad circles of white foam, amid which the blue of the waves pales suddenly to a wonderful azure. For the rest all is placid and motionless. The palm - fronds droop inert; no leaf stirs amid the cocoa or the shade-trees; the broad shovel-spears of the bananas are held aloft, glistening ever so faintly in the sunlight; the king-of-the-woods, conscious of his gorgeous raiment, and the little brilliant fly - catchers, which hunt in couples, sit so fearless upon the branches overhead that you could touch them with your outstretched riding-whip;-in the negro huts, in the sky, and on the placid sea, all is peace, save where the pelicans tumble and dive, and the little, spiteful gulls, no bigger than sandpipers, rob them insolently of the fruit of their clumsy labour. All is profoundly still, a hushed peace as of deep slumber under the quiet sunlight-still, and peaceful, and beautiful exceedingly; but with the hint of sadness-the key-note, or so it seems to me, of, these West Indian isles-underlying all.

And see, here, too, are graves -graves of Tobago's prosperous past,-for yonder, down in the valley, a high chimneystack, its ugliness mellowed by age and tragedy, points a beseeching and incongruous finger heavenward from out a mass

1

of stale fish and other misfortunes, down below, with the yellow sands and the calm sea before it, and the banks of foliage behind, you clamber up the ascent, and as you halt to breathe your pony you look out and down upon the typical Tobagonian view. King's Bay, Pirate's Bay, Bloody Bay, Dead Man's Bay, Englishman's Bay, Man o' War's Bay,-it matters not which of the half a hundred indentations wherewith the long coastline of Tobago is scalloped-each one of them presents a picture complete in itself, and that picture lives in the memory as the lovely, petulant face which this sunny island presents to the stranger that greets her.

Inshore the line of the main range rises, covered with forest -the "high woods" of the West Indies majestic and wonderful, albeit they lack the tremendous splendour, the mystery, the compelling charm, the brooding melancholy of those dear Malayan woodlands which were for so many years my home. Threading its way among the cocoa nut trees, down in the sandy bays before you and behind, runs the narrow brown thread of bridlepath which, quitting the flat, plunges headlong into masses of greenery and is lost. Again, before you and behind, the bay on either side is enclosed by a bold bluff rising sheer from the sea, the foliage covering it almost to the water's edge, presenting to the blueness of the lapping waves a wonderful contrast of colours. Half-way

out in the bays, perhaps, stand small groups of black rocks, and as you watch, the sea, which all the while lies seemingly motionless, heaves its waters slowly against their dripping sides, and draws them off again in broad circles of white foam, amid which the blue of the waves pales suddenly to a wonderful azure. For the rest all is placid and motionless. The palm-fronds droop inert; no leaf stirs amid the cocoa or the shade-trees; the broad shovel-spears of the bananas are held aloft, glistening ever so faintly in the sunlight; the king-of-the-woods, conscious of his gorgeous raiment, and the little brilliant flycatchers, which hunt in couples, sit so fearless upon the branches overhead that you could touch them with your outstretched riding-whip;-in the negro huts, in the sky, and on the placid sea, all is peace, save where the pelicans tumble and dive, and the little, spiteful gulls, no bigger than sandpipers, rob them insolently of the fruit of their clumsy labour. All is profoundly still, a hushed peace as of deep slumber under the quiet sunlight-still, and peaceful, and beautiful exceedingly; but with the hint of sadness-the key-note, or so it seems to me, of, these West Indian isles-underlying all.

And see, here, too, are graves -graves of Tobago's prosperous past,-for yonder, down in the valley, a high chimneystack, its ugliness mellowed by age and tragedy, points a beseeching and incongruous finger heavenward from out a mass

of trees and palms. Struggle down into the valley and draw near to that monument of lost endeavour, and you will emerge suddenly from the tropics into a tiny fragment of the dear Home country

"Here is England made with hands,
Wrought with pain in alien lands,—
An England very pitiful and drear;
For some exile's heart sank low,
As he toiled here long ago,

And today the grave of all his
hopes lies here!"

masonry

The little bright-faced river, hustling down from the green slopes inland to the freedom and the slavery of the sea, is dammed by a mighty wall of hoary, moss- and lichen-grown masonry, such as you may see in any county in England where the old watermills stand idle. A little lower down-stream other solid walls arise, fencing in a big farmyard, flanked by barns and houses of unmistakably English pattern(in the cosy homestead yonder you have had your shooting - lunch half a hundred times, you are tempted to believe)-and in the centre, standing too solidly, too squarely to earn the name of ruin, rises the factory, crowned by the tall chimney-stack.

Time and Tobago! Time and Tobago! In fancy you can see the bustling black hostlers putting in the team which is to draw the Napiers' coach on

a moment Sugar is King once more the old, cruel, ruthless, wanton, man-compelling monarch, the monarch who here lies dead with that tall, unused funnel of masonry as the monument above his grave! Such in our time is the place at which the first English Governor set foot upon the island.

The rule which Mr Browne's coming inaugurated endured for seventeen years, an unusually prolonged period, judged by the standard of previous occupations; but even in this little space Tobago justified its reputation as an isle of unrest. Three insurrections of slaves took place between 1770 and 1774, and these were punished literally with fire and sword, though the order was reversed, the poor tortured wretches not being led to the stake in the market-place of Scarborough until they had been made the victims of savage loppings and mutilations. One ringleader, it is recorded, was hanged in chains, and took seven days a-dying, and this was but a sample of the brutality wherewith punishments were meted out to the uncivilised by the "civilised

race.

99

One morning, at Roxborough, I lighted upon a tiny negro hut in which, curled up to sleep upon a plank, was

an infinitely wrinkled hag, who presently was aroused into a palsied wakefulness, and in the curious, high-pitched singsong of an earlier day spoke to us