these two peaks open out, and you find yourself in deep water close to the base of two obelisks, rather than mountains, which rise sheer out of the sea, one to the height of 2710, the other to that of 2680 feet, about a mile from each other.  Between them is the loveliest little bay; and behind them green wooded slopes rise toward the rearward mountain of the Souffriere.  The whole glitters clear and keen in blazing sunshine:  but behind, black depths of cloud and gray sheets of rain shroud all the central highlands in mystery and sadness.  Beyond them, without a shore, spreads open sea.  But the fantastic grandeur of the place cannot be described in words.  The pencil of the artist must be trusted.  I can vouch that he has not in the least exaggerated the slenderness and steepness of the rock-masses.  One of them, it is said, has never been climbed; unless a myth which hangs about it is true.  Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney’s men—­and numbering, according to the pleasure of the narrator, three hundred, thirty, or three—­are said to have warped themselves up it by lianes and scrub; but they found the rock-ledges garrisoned by an enemy more terrible than any French.  Beneath the bites of the Fer-de-lances, and it may be beneath the blaze of the sun, man after man dropped; and lay, or rolled down the cliffs.  A single survivor was seen to reach the summit, to wave the Union Jack in triumph over his head, and then to fall a corpse.  So runs the tale, which, if not true, has yet its value, as a token of what, in those old days, English sailors were believed capable of daring and of doing.

At the back of these two Pitons is the Souffriere, probably the remains of the old crater, now fallen in, and only 1000 feet above the sea:  a golden egg to the islanders, were it but used, in case of war, and any difficulty occurring in obtaining sulphur from Sicily, a supply of the article to almost any amount might be obtained from this and the other like Solfaterras of the British Antilles; they being, so long as the natural distillation of the substance continues active as at present, inexhaustible.  But to work them profitably will require a little more common-sense than the good folks of St. Lucia have as yet shown.  In 1836 two gentlemen of Antigua, {43a} Mr. Bennett and Mr. Wood, set up sulphur works at the Souffriere of St. Lucia, and began prosperously enough, exporting 540 tons the first year.  ‘But in 1840,’ says Mr. Breen, ‘the sugar-growers took the alarm,’ fearing, it is to be presumed, that labour would be diverted from the cane-estates, ’and at their instigation the Legislative Council imposed a tax of 16s. sterling on every ton of purified sulphur exported from the colony.’  The consequence was that ’Messrs. Bennett and Wood, after incurring a heavy loss of time and treasure, had to break up their establishment and retire from the colony.’  One has heard of the man who killed the goose to get the golden egg.  In this case the goose, to avoid the trouble of laying, seems to have killed the man.