To the Anglican clergy, meanwhile, whom I met in the West Indies, I am bound to offer my thanks, not for courtesies shown to me—­that is a slight matter—­but for the worthy fashion in which they seem to be upholding the honour of the good old Church in the colonies.  In Port of Spain I heard and saw enough of their work to believe that they are in nowise less active—­more active they cannot be—­than if they were seaport clergymen in England.  The services were performed thoroughly well; with a certain stateliness, which is not only allowable but necessary, in a colony where the majority of the congregation are coloured; but without the least foppery or extravagance.  The very best sermon, perhaps, for matter and manner, which I ever heard preached to unlettered folk, was preached by a young clergyman—­a West Indian born—­in the Great Church of Port of Spain; and he had no lack of hearers, and those attentive ones.  The Great Church was always a pleasant sight, with its crowded congregation of every hue, all well dressed, and with the universal West Indian look of comfort; and its noble span of roof overhead, all cut from island timber—­another proof of what the wood-carver may effect in the island hereafter.  Certainly distractions were frequent and troublesome, at least to a newcomer.  A large centipede would come out and take a hurried turn round the Governor’s seat; or a bat would settle in broad daylight in the curate’s hood; or one had to turn away one’s eyes lest they should behold—­not vanity, but—­the magnificent head of a Cabbage-palm just outside the opposite window, with the black vultures trying to sit on the footstalks in a high wind, and slipping down, and flopping up again, half the service through.  But one soon got accustomed to the strange sights; though it was, to say the least, somewhat startling to find, on Christmas Day, the altar and pulpit decked with exquisite tropic flowers; and each doorway arched over with a single pair of coconut leaves, fifteen feet high.

The Christmas Day Communion, too, was one not easily to be forgotten.  At least 250 persons, mostly coloured, many as black as jet, attended; and were, I must say for them, most devout in manner.  Pleasant it was to see the large proportion of men among them, many young white men of the middle and upper class; and still more pleasant, too, to see that all hues and ranks knelt side by side without the least distinction.  One trio touched me deeply.  An old lady—­I know not who she was—­with the unmistakable long, delicate, once beautiful features of a high-bred West Indian of the ’Ancien Regime,’ came and knelt reverently, feebly, sadly, between two old Negro women.  One of them seemed her maid.  Both of them might have been once her slaves.  Here at least they were equals.  True Equality—­the consecration of humility, not the consecration of envy—­first appeared on earth in the house of God, and at the altar of Christ:  and I question much whether it will linger long in any spot on earth where that house and that altar are despised.  It is easy to propose an equality without Christianity; as easy as to propose to kick down the ladder by which you have climbed, or to saw off the bough on which you sit.  As easy; and as safe.