cone, which was blasted away in 1718, leaving the present crater-ring of cliffs and peaks; and that thus may be explained the discrepancies in the accounts of its height, which Mr. Scrope gives as 4940 feet, and Humboldt and Dr. Davy at 3000, a measurement which seems to me to be more probably correct?  The mountain is said to have been slightly active in 1785.  In 1812 its old crater had been for some years (and is now) a deep blue lake, with walls of rock around 800 feet in height, reminding one traveller of the Lake of Albano. {44} But for twelve months it had given warning, by frequent earthquake shocks, that it had its part to play in the great subterranean battle between rock and steam; and on the 27th of April 1812 the battle began.

A negro boy—­he is said to be still alive in St. Vincent—­was herding cattle on the mountain-side.  A stone fell near him; and then another.  He fancied that other boys were pelting him from the cliffs above, and began throwing stones in return.  But the stones fell thicker:  and among them one, and then another, too large to have been thrown by human hand.  And the poor little fellow woke up to the fact that not a boy, but the mountain, was throwing stones at him; and that the column of black cloud which was rising from the crater above was not harmless vapour, but dust, and ash, and stone.  He turned, and ran for his life, leaving the cattle to their fate, while the steam mitrailleuse of the Titans—­to which all man’s engines of destruction are but pop-guns—­roared on for three days and nights, covering the greater part of the island in ashes, burying crops, breaking branches off the trees, and spreading ruin from which several estates never recovered; and so the 30th of April dawned in darkness which might be felt.

Meanwhile, on that same day, to change the scene of the campaign two hundred and ten leagues, ‘a distance,’ as Humboldt says, ’equal to that between Vesuvius and Paris,’ ’the inhabitants, not only of Caraccas, but of Calabozo, situate in the midst of the Llanos, over a space of four thousand square leagues, were terrified by a subterranean noise, which resembled frequent discharges of the loudest cannon.  It was accompanied by no shock:  and, what is very remarkable, was as loud on the coast as at eighty leagues’ distance inland; and at Caraccas, as well as at Calabozo, preparations were made to put the place in defence against an enemy who seemed to be advancing with heavy artillery.’  They might as well have copied the St. Vincent herd-boy, and thrown their stones, too, at the Titans; for the noise was, there can be no doubt, nothing else than the final explosion in St. Vincent far away.  The same explosion was heard in Venezuela, the same at Martinique and Guadaloupe:  but there, too, there were no earthquake shocks.  The volcanoes of the two French islands lay quiet, and left their English brother to do the work.  On the same day a stream of lava rushed down from the mountain, reached the sea in four hours, and then all was over.  The earthquakes which had shaken for two years a sheet of the earth’s surface larger than half Europe were stilled by the eruption of this single vent.