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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 inquiries 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 labor, 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 slave-population, 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 blood-stained catalogue which enumerates earth's wrong avenged by wrong, infamous oppression, and mad retaliation, few pages are redder than these. For six months the insurgents held out against the forces sent against them from St. Thomas, till at last, after many vicissitudes of savage warfare, French assistance, invoked from the neighboring islands by the panicstricken Danes, turned the scale in the favor of European skill; the Africans were reduced not to submission but to suicide, and four hundred self-slain corpses were found by the victorious whites on one spot alone. And in truth those, happily the greater number, of the vanquished who thus opened for themselves with their own hands that only sure gate of freedom, death, did wisely and well; their less fortunate prisoner-comrades did not pass that gate till after tortures that few writers now would dare so much as to describe. Eastern governments, Mahometan caliphs, and sultans, have been accused, and not altogether unjustly, of frequent and wanton cruelty; but no Arab, Turk, or even Persian but would have shrunk back aghast from the cold-blooded, torment-devising atrocity of the triumphant Dutch and Danish slave-owners. The awful hurricane that a few weeks later devastated the island of St. Thomas could not with all its rain-torrents wash out the red stains of those hideous executions.

Thirty years more passed unrecorded for good or evil alike; till in 1764 the Royal Edict of Copenhagen that rendered the harbor of St. Thomas a free port inaugurated a new era that of commerce, merchandise, and prosperity.

Followed the struggle of the New World, then awaking, province after province, into self-consciousness and independent life; and the Danish island, neutral, central, and marked out by Nature herself as the one haven of refuge for the countless sails that speckle these tornado-swept seas, reaped directly and indirectly a full and ever-increasing share of the golden harvest that was being planted the while on other lands in the blood of the laborers. The resort of countless cruisers, half privateer, half pirate; the mart of men who, under color of serving national interests, advanced their own; the favorite exchange for shoddy supply contracts; the chartered meet for unscrupulous speculators in dubious prizes and blockade-runnings, St. Thomas soon acquired a new importance, and with it

a character that, however disguised or modified by more orderly times, and the necessity of cloaking illegal gains under forms of law, has never wholly left the place.

Soon after the American war, the revolutionary shock that upset so many European thrones made itself felt through their far-off dependencies in the Caribbean Sea; and St. Thomas came in among the rest for a share in the vicissitudes of which Denmark had so large and so disastrous a part. For a short time in 1801, and again in 1807, England held with a careless grasp a post the commercial value of which she might have easily estimated from the flourishing condition in which she found it; but blind in 1815, as on so many other occasions, to her own best interests, she a third time abandoned it, as she had first done when it was a mere barren rock, a hundred and fifty years before; and the white cross Dannebrog" again floated over fort and harbor.

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From that date to the present, the annals of St. Thomas are made up of export, import, commissions, smuggling, bill-broking, discounting, pilfering, and the ordinary vicissitudes of credit-commerce conducted on the unstable basis of New-World speculation. Meanwhile, the emancipation of slaves, tardily wrung from, rather than conceded by, their Danish masters in 1848, gave the finishing stroke to the already declining sugar cultivation of the island; for what human being, however black, would, if his own free choice were given him, remain to toil at the lowest possible wages on the estates of a planter, while a single day's work among the shipping in the harbor might bring him higher gains than a whole week of spade and hoe? Negroes are not far-sighted, but have ordinarily a remarkably acute vision for what lies immediately before their ugly flat noses. So the canes, of which nothing but highpressure slave-labor could ever possibly have made a paying crop in this uncongenial soil, disappeared as if by enchantment, to be replaced with as magical a celerity for the cycle of tropical vegetation is a swift one — by scrubby bush, frangipane, aloe, cactus, and every thorny and prickly thing "for which we may thank Adam." And thus matters have, in the main, gone their course up to the present day.

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Shall we add how, in 1867, the American eagle cast a longing eye on this sea-girt morsel? and how the majesty of Denmark, not less eager for I forget how many millions of dollars, dangled the tempting bait before the republican bird, till it was thought to be a bargain between them; only when it came to payment, the greenbacks were not forthcoming, and one more repudiation of agreement was noted in Jonathan's account-book? Or shall we chronicle the hurricanes of 1819, 1833, 1867, and 1871; or depict the terrors of the earthquake plus sea-wave that, on the third of the above-assigned dates, made such a mark upon the imaginations of the inhabitants of St. Thomas? Enough; the stars and the stripes have not yet supplanted the Dannebrog on the fort heights, and, except a headless palm or two, few traces of a cyclone outlast a twelvemonth; at any rate, none appear in view as we exchange the glossy blackness of Heaven and the Challenger best know how many thousand fathoms of the pure Atlantic depths outside for the muddy green of shallow waters and an uncleanly harbor.

"Charlotte-Amalia" is, so old Danish maps inform us, the name of the town; and perhaps the gods still call it so; only, like the old knight's song in Alice's "Wonderland," or "Looking-glass"-I am not sure which, neither of those authentic narratives forming part of my travelling library, the more 's the pity—it is called quite differently among mortals, in whose vocabulary it has appropriated to itself the apostolic-sounding designation of the entire island. But, whatever its name, the town looks pretty enough from the prow of the steamer as we pass between the light-house on our right and the two-gun fort on our left, and make for our anchorage; though an officer of the Elbe-sociable and chatty, as most of the R. M. S. P. Company's officers are informs me, as I gaze upon it, that it shows still prettier when seen from the stern of the boat. I can readily believe him; for the same glance that tells

me in the first half-minute whatever there is to like in the town of St. Thomas, tells me also what there is not.

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Part on, part between, three buttress-like pyramidical spurs which run down seaward almost to the water's edge from a high knife-ridge of reddish-brown bush-sprinkled hills, there stand, crowded together, about fifteen hundred white-walled, red-roofed, green-shuttered houses, one rather bigger, another smaller, than its neighbor; but all without more method or order in their juxtaposition than that observable in a chance human crowd, each house having apparently jostled itself into the midst, and occupied the first piece of ground on which it could secure a footing, selfishly regardless of any other consideration. The next object of each appears to have been which should display the greatest number of windows. A Danish Pitt might from the taxation of those apertures alone clear off half the national debt of Denmark, whatever its amount. Every window presents instead of glass- a substance rarely employed here in the form of panes, and indeed superfluous in so mild a climate - Venetian jalousies of the conventional green, besides a pair of stout wooden shutters, to be closed and barred at the first threat of a hurricane, not else. For of nightly thieves, housebreakers, and villainous "centre-bits" there is little fear, partly owing to the efficiency of the Danish town police, partly to the character of the islanders themselves, of whom more hereafter. As to the houses themselves, a few very few of them are solidly built; red brick picked out with plaster, of which last-named material, eked out with lath and rubble, far the greater number wholly consist; some are even mere wooden barracks, spacious, ugly, and insecure to see. Wood or otherwise, almost all these dwellings prove on a near inspection to be trumpery run-up constructions, with thin walls baking in the blazing sun, shallow unprotective roofeaves, and the majority without a verandah of any sort. Only here and there some more pretentious mansion - the large, ungainly edifice recently erected as Government House, for instance-has pushed out- Heaven save the mark-a cast-iron balcony, as ugly as any that ever figured at Hammersmith or on the Brompton Road. Worse yet are the churches; the so-called English, i. e., Colono-Episcopalian, being of ante-Puginian Gothic, hideous enough in any latitude, absolutely monstrous in this; the Dutch Reformed, or Presbyterian, the heaviest plaster Doric; the Moravian Chapel a large shapeless barn; and the Danish, or Lutheran Church, a simple nondescript. An East Indian bungalow, a Brazilian cathedral, even a Turkish residence in Upper Egypt, each tells in its outline, and yet more in its details, something either of the architectural traditions peculiar to the race that erected it, or of prudent adaptation to a new climate; or, it may be, of both. Hence, in looking on buildings like these, we at once perceive that their architects, whether Portuguese, Turks, or English, had fully determined to make the country they came to govern or to colonize their own home in the fullest sense of the word: nor yet, while modifying, to renounce altogether the hereditary and almost typical peculiarities of their original nationality. St. Thomas, on the contrary, is in its general character neither Danish nor Dutch nor anything else; it is an aggregation of lodgers and lodging-houses, nothing more; English, Scotch, Spanish, French, Italian, American, architects, inhabitants the only object they have had, one and all, in settling here, has been that of making as much money as they could from the business of the place, and then being off as quick as possible. Their stay in the island is a mere temporary makeshift, a commercial arrangement, and their dwellings are naturally enough in accordance with their scheme of life.

Pleasanter objects to look at are the little cottage-houses where mulatto, or, as they prefer being called, "colored," families make their nests. Bright-painted wooden boxes, green or blue, all made up to outward appearance of doors, windows, and galleries, but well sheltered from the brooding heat by projecting roofs, wide verandas, and flowering tropical trees, planted wherever the rocky soil will allow a root to hold, they harmonize well with the climate,

and give correct indication of a comparatively settled population for their inhabitants. These last are chiefly clerks, artisans, skilled workmen, and the like, some born in the island itself, others natives of Tortola, Antigua, Barbadoes Porto Rico, and the like. Their number is more than double that of the European-born colonists. A gay, active, and improvident set, they at least know how to live; the West Indian archipelago is their home; they have no other; they are part and parcel of the island; to its conditions they suit the circumstances of their existence, and make the best of climate and everything else. Crossbreeds and the Europeans together amount to a third or so of the entire population of St. Thomas; but the two castes do not socially coalesce, and the aims and sentiments of the one have little in common with those of the other. Scattered round the outskirts of the town, and jotted, where one least expects to find them, among the mangotrees and guava-bushes of the open country, small wattled, or boarded cabins, each hardly bigger than a sentry-box, but by no means equally compact in its construction, give shelter to negro families. Free men now, and ready enough to work, to gain, and to squander too; unwilling only, partly owing to the hated and still fresh reminiscences of slavery, partly from their own natural instability of character, to enter into long engagements or to pledge their labor beforehand, these darkies constitute about two thirds of the inhabitants of the island. Their shirts and trousers are more or less of European cut; but, dress and language apart, they differ in hardly any respect from their free brethren in Syria or Turkey. Mahometans there, they have here adopted Christianity, some one fashion, some another, according to that patronized by their former masters; but, Christian or Moslem, of dogma for itself they have little care; their creed is emotional only, and perhaps not much the worse for being so. Their huts, too, are the most genuinely_tropical objects of West Indian domestic architecture. I have seen the exact likenesses of them in Nubia and Yemen.

And the Danes? Well; if St. Thomas be, so far as the European population is concerned, a mere lodging-house, the Danes here act the part of the lodging-house keepers, neither more nor less. Like the rest, they resign themselves to live in hired dwellings; they collect customs and taxes, keep up a strict police by land and harbor, levy fines on unlicensed salesmen and market-women, imprison drunkards and vagrants, and—well, that is pretty nearly all. In the commercial enterprise, the shipping interests, the trade and traffic of the island they govern, they have next to no share; in planting and in agriculture no skill; in the island and its tenants no interest; nor do they care to take any measure for creating such among others on their account. Indeed, there is not throughout the whole of St. Thomas a single Danish school, nor in the solitary bookseller's shop (which, by the way, is a Moravian, not a Danish establishment) of the town is a Danish grammar or dictionary to be found. The public offices themselves, the law and police courts, and the rest, are mere hired rooms, or slight constructions of the usual makeshift character; they, too, are the work of the colonists and settlers; not a farthing has been contributed by the Treasury of Copenhagen towards their construction. A small, quaint, square fort, with battlements and turrets, much like those out of which the St. Barbara of art or the imprisoned princesses of fairy tales are wont to gaze, and which in fact now serves as town jail, is the only edifice contributed by Denmark herself to the town and island. The walls of this toy-castle are painted red, and the red Danish flag flies from the small round keep; it looks hot enough in the sun, and suggests the idea that the prisoners inside, now its only occupants, must be uncomfortably hot too. But the prison, fort, and flag excepted, no other symbol of Danish rule meets the gazer's eye as it takes in the panorama of the town from the steamer anchorage about a quarter of a mile off.

Nor when we land on the negro-crowded wharf do we find much to modify our first impressions in this respect. There is, indeed, a carved Danish inscription—the only

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one, so far as I have been able to discover, in the entire island- over the door of the staircase that leads up to the Custom House rooms; and Danish names, to which no one in common use pays the slightest attention, are roughly painted up at the corners of several streets. Also you may occasionally meet a tall, light-complexioned individual, whose stiff carriage and ceremonious bearing proclaim him a Danish official; or a blonde, heavy-eyed, slightly, or very, as the case may be, intoxicated, white-clothed soldier; there are about sixty of them on the island. Poor fellows; they have but a dull time of it in garrison; and if they occasionally try to render it a little less tedious by "heavyheaded revel," Hamlet himself would hardly have included them in the severity of his comments on this national failing: they have excuse for it if ever any one had. These things apart, however, there is nothing visible to right or left to indicate that the island belongs, and has for two centuries belonged, to the Danes, rather than to the Americans, the Chinese, or the Khan of Crim Tartary.

The universal language of communication among the inhabitants, white, black, or colored, is English; but such English! a compound of negro grammar, Yankee accent, and Creole drawl; to "arrange" is to "fix,” “sir” is "saʼar,” “boat" is "ba'awt," and so on. The announcements of the shop fronts, the placards on the walls, the debile little newspapers (there are two published here, and the ferocious antagonism of their respective editors in print is, I trust, limited to that medium, and does not represent their private and personal feelings), are English; and, but for an occasional Spanish sentence, English is the only language you hear in market, street, or shop. I beg pardon there are no "shops" in St. Thomas, only "stores;" just as every man here, dustcarters and coalheavers not excepted, is a "gentleman," and every woman, including the aged black Hebe who distributes rum and gin for two cents to her sailor customers, a "lady." The physical atmosphere you breathe may be that of the tropics; but the moral or non-moral, public and private, is that of New York; as for the social, it has in it a corrective dash of Spanish Creolism, in which languor supplies an opportune check on vice, and nonchalance on dishonesty. For the rest, as you walk down, that is (for west the everblowing east trade-wind determines the "up" of the island), along the main street on the narrow alluvial level between the hill slope and the crescent harbor base, you might, but for the blazing sun and dazzling azure overhead, almost fancy yourself in a 'long-shore quarter of Southampton or Wapping. Ship chandleries, dry goods, rum shops, slop shops, tobacco shops, sailors' homes (such homes! fleecing dens they might more truly be called), coal wharves, timber yards-objects that no climate can beautify, no associations render other than mean and vulgar. The latitude is the latitude of the poet-sung tropics; but the scene is a scene of the coarsest Europe. In vain you call to mind the metrical enchantments of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall or dreamy "Voyage," of Byron's heated "Island," of Coleridge's magical "Fragment:" everything around dispels the conjured-up illusion. A drunken seaman and a filthy old hag are squabbling on one side of you words very English certainly, but not to be found in Johnson's dictionary, issue from the grog-shop on the other: the vile features of a Creole crimp, arm in arm with a mottled-faced, dull-eyed Halifax skipper, meet you in front sight, hearing, smell, all are of that peculiar description which charms the sailor, the British specimen in particular, and those too, perhaps, who make money out of or through him; but which is, as Carlyle might say, "exhilarating in the long run to no other created being none, at least, who have not received the special training of those useful but unlovely classes.

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Nor are the details of the town in other respects such as to bear with advantage a close examination. The streets, the main one excepted, are mostly mere lanes, narrow, and crooked; while many of them-those, namely, which run from the harbor inland consist of flights of stony stairs, which had Byron seen he would have blessed those of Malta by comparison instead of cursing them. The pave

ment, too, absolutely wanting in not a few places, is rough and full of holes in others; and the drains-for sanitary motives, say the townsmen ! — are all open; what the result is after a fortnight or so of hot, dry weather I leave to the imagination of those highly respectable members of Parliamentary Committees who lay yearly reports on corresponding odorous topics before our British noses. Gaslights exist, it is true, in the principal thoroughfares, but they are few and far between; while for the shiny nights of half the month the wandering moon bears alone the charge of public illumination; whence it follows that the clouds and the municipality have too often to divide the responsibility of outer darkness and its consequences, physical or moral. I have not myself had the good fortune of visiting Copenhagen; but I trust that the Danes at home treat their capital better than they do the principal town of their West Indian possessions.

But the place, though it cannot be called lovely, is lively enough. Siestas, strange to say, in spite of the relaxing climate and the infectious proximity to the Spanish colonies, are not the fashion here, and from sunrise to sunset the main street can show a medley of nationalities to the full as varied as that which daily throng the wooden bridge of Galata, but with a much greater diversity of hue. Black, indeed, predominates among the complexions, and white among the garments; but between these extremes of color every shade of skin and dress alike may be observed. Broad-brimmed Panama hats distinguish in general the better class of citizens; commoner straw shelters poorer heads. Sallow, parboiled-looking countenances with now and then an unhealthy flush, telling a tale of brandy overmuch in the daily allowance of iced water, denote the North European, Teuton or Scandinavian, Briton, German, Dane, Dutch, and Swede, with the pale, over-worked-looking, sharp-featured Yankee. A darker tinge of face and hair, and a slenderer form, indicate the Italian, French, or Spanish salesman; the white Creole, whatever his semi or quarter nationality, may always be recognized by his peculiarly weedy aspect and lack-lustre eye. Two or three generations of West Indian birth and breeding, unrenewed by fresh European or African grafts, suffice to thin out the richest European blood, and to dull into lethargy the most active North European brain, till the Englishman, Dane, Norwegian, or Dutchman becomes a thing for the very negroes to pity or despise. "Miscegenation," to borrow an ungainly American word, may have its drawbacks; but exclusiveness of alliance means for the North European in these regions speedy degeneration and disappearance.

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Busy, restless, affable, at once cringing and forward in manner, who does not recognize the children of Israel, the genuine descendants of clever, birthright-purloining Jacob, whatever be the land of their sojourn in their world-wide dispersion? Here in St. Thomas we have them of every sort, dark and fair, lean and burly, but all alike intent on gain; now prosperous, now bankrupt; the very climate that may occasionally somewhat slacken their outward man has no relaxing effect on the irrepressible energy of their will. It is curious to enter their synagogue large, crowded, and evidently thriving one- and to hear the unchanged songs of old David and older Moses in the oldest language of the Old World, intoned here with as much fervency of utterance and singleness of belief as ever they had been in the Eastern hemisphere under the palms of Jordan, long before a Western world and the cocoanuttrees of its islands had been heard or dreamt of. The first names entered on the world's race-course, they bid fair to be among the first on its books when the winners are told off at the close. Meanwhile the antithesis their activity affords to the lounging, careless, take-it-easy movements of the big negrocs at every turn and corner, does much to enliven the sun-heated streets and thoroughfares of the

town.

But it is at night, and especially when the white rays of the full moon, the Queen of the Tropics, delusively cover roofs and pavement with what seems a smooth layer of fresh-fallen snow, that the main street of St. Thomas, the open space in front of the Custom House, known as King's

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Wharf-the only stone wharf, by the bye, in the whole harbor, and constructed not indeed with Danish money, but under Danish superintendence - and the acaciaplanted square, that serves as market-place by day, all show to the best advantage. Then the negroes, who here, as in the cheerful Levant, and even on the misty Euxine coast, keep up unaltered their ancestral African customs of nightly merry-makings a custom which the Arabs alone, of all races that it has been my fortune to dwell amongst, share with them come out in their gayest dresses and gayest mood, to shout, laugh, sing, romp, and divert themselves like the overgrown children that they are. Tall black men in white clothes and straw-hats, tall black women too, handsome in form if not in feature, their heads bound round with many-colored turbans, sweep through the crowd with an easy freedom of gait and bold step very different from the shuffling, embarrassed style of the nerveless Creole lady and her over-dressed European sister; while the light-flowing gown of the negress and her variegated head-gear give her, even independently of her dark complexion, a semi-tropical look that suits the climate, and harmonizes much better than stiff crinolines and artificial flowers with the surroundings of West Indian nature. When will civilized women, or civilized men either, learn that individual beauty, to have its complete effect, must harmonize with the general? that form and color, size and shape, however fair or stately in themselves, acquire their ultimate perfection from the place they occupy? that what is well under one sky may be ill under another? what is justly admired in Europe be a failure in Asia? and what looks lovely under a tropical blaze be void of charm amid the mists of northern gloom? When the Egyptians erected the colonnades of Luxor on the shores of the great Nile, the Greeks the Parthenon among the blue, picture-like hills of Attica, and mediæval architects the clustering pinnacles of Laon beside the orchards and green hill-slopes of Picardy, they accomplished in every instance an abiding success, different the one from the other, but each perfect in its kind- an example, a lesson, and a wonder to all ages. Why, then, have their later successors, who in modern times have attempted to reproduce these very masterpieces of beauty in elaborate copies, every measurement, every line, every detail the same, failed not less completely than the others succeeded? Is it not that they ignored, with the ignorance that amounts to stolidity, the effect of altered conditions, of changed times, of different climate, of dissimilar surroundings, both of nature and art? while the former architects, Egyptian, Gaul, or Greek, knew, with the knowledge that amounts to instinct, not only the laws of construction and the grace of individual outline, but also those of collective harmony; and built aptly besides building well. Thus it is and always must be, East or West alike, with architecture of whatever kind, public or private; thus, too, in great measure with sculpture, with painting, with ornament, with dress, in a word, with art of every sort.

Meanwhile, as we walk and philosophize in the tepid night air and pale moonshine, from behind a hundred open lighted windows comes the sound of jingling pianos, where mulatto girls are peforming their endless Spanish waltzes; performances accompanied in many a little house by the clamor of many voices and the stamp of dancing feet. All is frank, unrestrained merry making, high spirits, and fun; the more cheerful because to the credit of the blacks be it said—it is seldom excited or accompanied by drink, more seldom by drunkenness. West Indian negroes, in spite of the contrary example set them more or less by almost every class and description of whites in these is ands, are generally free from this particular form of vice; and though the morality of domestic life is not so much low as absolutely wanting among them—indeed, that non est inventus might be the correct verdict of a "virtue" court -the frailties of the island-born African, or black Creole, are rarely excused or aggravated by drink. Among the mulattoes, on the contrary, as among mixed races in general, the bad qualities of either parentage seem to come uppermost; and the immorality of the negro is with them

often enhanced by the drunkenness of the Briton and the murderous treachery of the Spaniard. "God made white men, and God made black men, but the devil made brown ones," is a common proverb here, and it often finds its justification in fact.

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Town and inhabitants—the Israelite colony alone after its measure excepted - all impress you as mere mushroom growths of the day, with little root in the past, and hardly a promise of greater fixity in the future. And yet whatever "Charlotte-Amalia," to give the place its distinctive name, may prove to be when you are fairly in it and of it seen from outside, and especially from the harbor point of view, it has a curiously delusive Levantine look; so much so, that a voyager, who, under some strange enchantment of the "Sleeping Beauty "kind, should have closed his eyes while just off Smyrna or Latakia, and then first awakened up when the fairy ship was in the act of entering the port of St. Thomas, might almost fancy that he had never left the Syrian or Egean coast. He would, in fact, find before him much the same picturesque sprinkling of pretty toy-like houses that he had last seen under the sun of Anatolia; for instance, the same green masses, or orchard-trees, both running up the same abrupt rocky slopes, practicable indeed for horses, but evidently prohibitive of carriage use; the same high, bush-sprinkled, half-savage ridge of hills behind the same untidy wharves, makeshift landing-places, and rubbish-strewn beach; the same superfluity of little boats, plying hither and thither between the larger craft, or swarming, as though with piratical intent, round the sides of each new arrival; the same clear sharpness of light and shade; the same pure sea-water, brisk air, and bright sky. No, not exactly the same, any one of these; since a more careful inspection would detect strange foliage-cocoanut, for example, or papai- among the trees, giving notice of a latitude more southerly far than the Levantine; the water, too, is the inky Atlantic black, not the ultra-marine Mediterranean blue in its clearness; and the low, drifting fleeces of white cloud that emerge, curl after curl, from behind the easterly hill-range, and sweep swiftly across the dazzling sky to the west, are driven by no Asiatic land-breeze, but obey the trade-winds of the ocean expanse.

But, general outline and natural features apart, there are some special objects in which St. Thomas may claim a real, though superficial, resemblance with the time-honored Levant. Thus, at the very entry of the harbor, near a diminutive powder shed, there stands a battery, whichbut that the Danish, and not the Turkish, flag overshadows it might, by a new-comer, be almost conjectured to belong to the same class of constructions that stand guard at the entry of the Bosphorus or the quarantine bay of Trebizond. Through the thin embrasures of a decrepit parapet wall two rusty cannons protrude their muzzles, the one pointing at an angle of 45° to the heaven above, the other at a similar inclination to the waters beneath. Quite Turkish both for appearance and efficiency. Nor do the five or six antiquated tubes of old iron that peer over the edges of the queer, red-painted fort walls at the harbor's base differ in any essential respect from the artillery supplied by the Topkhaneh of Constantinople to the imperial provinces. Strangely, too, like the ruins that on almost every jutting rock of the Anatolian coast commemorate the days of semi-independent Pashas and pugnacious Dereh-begs, are the two round towers, massive and gray, that crown, the one "Government Hill," the easternmost of the three already mentioned as included in the town itself; the other, an isolated rising ground near the base of the harbor. Nor is this resemblance one of outward form only, but of historical meaning; for, unlike everything else in the island, these towers are dignified by having a tradition of their own; and in popular belief at least, if not in fact, they supply the "missing link" between the modern St. Thomas of sharp, Yankeefied traders, and the old St. Thomas of bonâ fide pirates and buccaneers. of these ruins bears the name of Blue Beard's, the other of Black Beard's Tower. This New-World Blue Beard, however, unlike, so far, to his namesake of European or,

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head, beard, ribbons, matches, and all, suspended from his bowsprit, history has left unrecorded.

Whether Black Beard really built, and, while on shore, -taking refuge from his pursuers, or recruiting supplies for fresh exploits at sea, actually dwelt in the thick-walled round tower that now crowns the highly respectable summit of Government Hill, is, however, uncertain; here, as in the case of so many other heroic memorials, it is merely tradition versus want of evidence. Old ship-cannon have indeed been dug out of the neighboring soil; and a huge oblong mass of brickwork, close by the tower itself, is said to cover alike the remains headless, I suppose - and the ill-gotten riches of the pirate. But from one or other motive chiefly, perhaps, from the listless indifference that characterizes the white population of the West Indian settlements in general-nobody has taken the trouble to settle, by a few strokes of the mattock, the truth, or, more probably still, the falsehood, of the legend.

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Requiescat in pace," if peace there be for such, along with the great Captains Kidd, Avory, Low, and other kindred sea-heroes, "all of them fallen, slain by the sword, who caused their terror in the land of the living.' Helltwins, piracy and slavery-they have both, after centuries of blood and crime, been well-nigh exorcised from the NewWorld coasts, or only linger under the appropriate flags of Spain and Holy Church, the flags of Alva and Pizarro, of Torquemada and the Inquisition. It is "the glory, far above all else on earth," of England to have first pronounced their exorcism; the final consummation of that sentence on the ill remnants of Cuba may, though delayed awhile, be yet executed by England's eldest child, the great American Republic. The work is a good work: honor to those who complete it, of whatever nationality they be!

Our hero's short but glorious career was run between Jamaica and the Virginian coast. St. Thomas lies midway, and the inumerable creeks, inlets, and bays that indent its bush-lined shore may well have afforded shelter and concealment to Black Beard as well as to others of this trade. And certainly when attired in his favorite full-dress style, and with his beard (which we are assured covered his whole face, eyes and nose probably excepted) twisted into a hundred curls, each curl dandily tied up in a bow of red ribbon, and illuminated by twenty burning matches stuck, ten of a side, under the brim of his hat, the Captain must have produced quite a sensation among the inhabitants Carib, negro, Dutch, or Dane of the little island. Indeed, the "flaming ministers" of his toilet seem to have proved for West Indian fair ones not less attractive than lighted tapers commonly are for evening moths; and we read that fourteen wives-successive or simultaneous, the story says not were drawn by their rays, and entangled in the mazes of that ribboned beard. Unfortunately the human butterflies seem to have paid not less dearly for their folly than is ordinarily the case with their insect prototypes, STORY OF JACK SCOTT AND BESSY SURsince Black Beard, unless much maligned, was a very Blue Beard in domestic life.

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"A cross between Puck and Moloch" is the title given by the shrewd historical estimate of Macaulay to one of the pet monarch heroes of an eccentricity-loving writer of our own day. What the father of the Great Frederick was in his own family and court, that and more was Captain Trench among his crew- a hero after Mr. Carlyle's own heart, and not less worthy of a place in the Pantheon of his worship than Friedrich Wilhelm or Governor Eyre himself. Indeed, the choicest diversions of Potsdam or Morant Bay seem tame when compared with Black Beard's practical fun. "Let us make a little hell of our own, and try who can bear it longest," said, one day, the gallant Captain, as he forced some choice spirits of his crew to descend with him into the ship's hold. When all were below, Black Beard carefully closed the hatches on the company and himself, and then proceeded to set on fire several pots which he had previously arranged, ready filled with shavings and sulphur. His companions, almost suffocated, soon cried out for mercy; but Black Beard's lungs, as well as his heart, were made of sterner stuff, and he did not let them out of his imitation hell till they had almost exchanged the trial for the reality. Thinking them, however, it seems, sufficiently prepared by this experiment for the latter, he soon after took measures for sending one or two of them there at short notice. To this end he invited his comrades one evening to a sociable merry-making in his cabin; and, while they sat drinking there, he suddenly blew out the light, crossed his hands, in each of which was a loaded and ready-cocked pistol, and cheerfully fired across the table. Sad to say, his praiseworthy intentions were frustrated of their accomplishment; only wounds, and not death, following upon this " merry jest." But to do the bearded Captain justice, when not his own men, but prisoners from another ship, were before him, he seldom failed to take better aim. How much the unhanged survivors of his crew, not to mention his fourteen disconsolate widows, bewailed his loss, when Lieutenant Maynard, R. N., sailed into the harbor of Virginia with this worthy's

TEES.

THE Scotts are an old and widely diffused Border clan. They have had many distinguished men amongst them; the greatest of all being the illustrious poet and novelist, of whose personal appearance and genial character some of us have still an agreeable remembrance. As an active, pushing race, the Scotts have spread far beyond their native glens, crossed the Border, and settled in various parts of Northumberland.

In the early part of last century, there dwelt in Sandgate, an old-fashioned thoroughfare near the Tyne, outside Newcastle, a family of these Scotts, whose occupation lay among the barges and coal-traders on the river. They were an industrious, decent set of people, with no pretensions to gentility, and, as was reasonable, improved in circumstances from one generation to another. The family begins to emerge from obscurity in the person of William Scott, who is apprenticed to a coal-fitter in Newcastle. A coal-fitter is a kind of middle-man between the owner of coal-pits and shippers. He purchases the coal, transfers it to barges called keels, whence it is put on board ships in the river. The word keel, from an old Anglo-Saxon term, signifying a barque, is now lost to the general vernacular, but remains preserved in a popular ballad," Weel may the Keel row. The term also keeps its ground in relation to the coal-barges on the Tyne, where owners of keels are men of considerable substance. The William Scott we have been speaking of rose by his steadiness and intelligence to be a coal-fitter and proprietor of keels, with numerous keelmen in his employment. With a view to keep his men from straggling away among public-houses, he for a time kept a house for their special accommodation, the sale of beer to them adding to his ordinary gains. This concern, however, as not being creditable to a man in his flourishing circumstances, was, after a time, dropped. From being an owner of keels, he, in due course, became an owner of ships, in which capacity few men attained greater note on the Tyne from Newcastle to Shields and Sunderland.

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