bad; and the sugar, when made, disposed of through merchants by a cumbrous, antiquated, and expensive system.  These shrewd Frenchmen, and, I am told, even small proprietors among the Negroes, not being crippled, happily for them, by those absurd sugar-duties which, till Mr. Lowe’s budget, put a premium on the making of bad sugar, are confining themselves to growing the canes, and sell them raw to ‘Usines Centrales,’ at which they are manufactured into sugar.  They thus devote their own capital and intellect to increasing the yield of their estates; while the central factories, it is said, pay dividends ranging from twenty to forty per cent.  I regretted much that I was unable to visit in crop-time one of these factories, and see the working of a system which seems to contain one of the best elements of the co-operative principle.

But (and this is at present a serious inconvenience to a traveller in the Antilles) the steamer passes each island only once a fortnight; so that to land in an island is equivalent to staying there at least that time, unless one chooses to take the chances of a coasting schooner, and bad food, bugs, cockroaches, and a bunk which—­but I will not describe.  ‘Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda’ (down the companion) ‘e passa.’

I must therefore content myself with describing, as honestly as I can, what little we saw from the sea, of islands at each of which we would gladly have stayed several days.

As the traveller nears each of them—­Guadaloupe, Dominica, Martinique (of which two last we had only one passing glance), St. Vincent, St. Lucia, and Grenada—­he will be impressed, not only by the peculiarity of their form, but by the richness of their colour.

All of them do not, like St. Kitts, Guadaloupe, and St. Vincent, slope up to one central peak.  In Martinique, for instance, there are three separate peaks, or groups of peaks—­the Mont Pelee, the Pitons du Carbet, and the Piton du Vauclain.  But all have that peculiar jagged outline which is noticed first at the Virgin Islands.

Flat ‘vans’ or hog-backed hills, and broad sweeps of moorland, so common in Scotland, are as rare as are steep walls of cliff, so common in the Alps.  Pyramid is piled on pyramid, the sides of each at a slope of about 45 degrees, till the whole range is a congeries of multitudinous peaks and peaklets, round the base of which spreads out, with a sudden sweep, the smooth lowland of volcanic ash and lava.  This extreme raggedness of outline is easily explained.  The mountains have never been, as in Scotland, planed smooth by ice.  They have been gouged out, in every direction, by the furious tropic rains and tropic rain-torrents.  Had the rocks been stratified and tolerably horizontal, these rains would have cut them out into tablelands divided by deep gullies, such as may be seen in Abyssinia, and in certain parts of the western United States.  But these rocks are altogether amorphous and unstratified,