Strangely enough, this snake, so fatal to man, has no power against another West Indian snake, almost equally common, namely, the Cribo. {40} This brave animal, closely connected with our common water-snake, is perfectly harmless, and a welcome guest in West Indian houses, because he clears them of rats.  He is some six or eight feet long, black, with more or less bright yellow about the tail and under the stomach.  He not only faces the Fer-de-lance, who is often as big as he, but kills and eats him.  It was but last year, I think, that the population of Carenage turned out to see a fight in a tree between a Cribo and a Fer-de-lance, of about equal size, which, after a two hours’ struggle, ended in the Cribo swallowing the Fer-de-lance, head foremost.  But when he had got his adversary about one-third down, the Creoles—­just as so many Englishmen would have done—­seeing that all the sport was over, rewarded the brave Cribo by killing both, and preserving them as a curiosity in spirits.  How the Fer-de-lance came into the Antilles is a puzzle.  The black American scorpion—­whose bite is more dreaded by the Negroes than even the snake’s—­may have been easily brought by ship in luggage or in cargo.  But the Fer-de-lance, whose nearest home is in Guiana, is not likely to have come on board ship.  It is difficult to believe that he travelled northward by land at the epoch—­if such a one there ever was—­when these islands were joined to South America:  for if so, he would surely be found in St. Vincent, in Grenada, and most surely of all in Trinidad.  So far from that being the case, he will not live, it is said, in St. Vincent.  For (so goes the story) during the Carib war of 1795-96, the savages imported Fer-de-lances from St. Lucia or Martinique, and turned them loose, in hopes of their destroying the white men:  but they did not breed, dwindled away, and were soon extinct.  It is possible that they, or their eggs, came in floating timber from the Orinoco:  but if so, how is it that they have never been stranded on the east coast of Trinidad, whither timber without end drifts from that river?  In a word, I have no explanation whatsoever to give; as I am not minded to fall back on the medieval one, that the devil must have brought them thither, to plague the inhabitants for their sins.

Among all these beautiful islands, St. Lucia is, I think, the most beautiful; not indeed on account of the size or form of its central mass, which is surpassed by that of several others, but on account of those two extraordinary mountains at its south-western end, which, while all conical hills in the French islands are called Pitons, bear the name of The Pitons par excellence.  From most elevated points in the island their twin peaks may be seen jutting up over the other hills, like, according to irreverent English sailors, the tips of a donkey’s ears.  But, as the steamer runs southward along the shore,