to be succeeded, after the long balmy night, by a sunrise which repeats the colours of the sunset, but this time gaudy, dazzling, triumphant, as befits the season of faith and hope.  Such imagery, it may be said, is hackneyed now, and trite even to impertinence.  It might be so at home; but here, in presence of the magnificent pageant of tropic sunlight, it is natural, almost inevitable; and the old myth of the daily birth and death of Helios, and the bridal joys and widowed tears of Eos, re-invents itself in the human mind, as soon as it asserts its power—­it may be, its sacred right—­to translate nature into the language of the feelings.

And, meanwhile, may we not ask—­have we not a right—­founded on that common sense of the heart which often is the deepest reason—­to ask, If we, gross and purblind mortals, can perceive and sympathise with so much beauty in the universe, then how much must not He perceive, with how much must not He sympathise, for whose pleasure all things are, and were created?  Who that believes (and rightly) the sense of beauty to be among the noblest faculties of man, will deny that faculty to God, who conceived man and all besides?

Wednesday, the 15th, was a really tropic day; blazing heat in the forenoon, with the thermometer at 82 degrees in the shade, and in the afternoon stifling clouds from the south-west, where a dark band of rain showed, according to the planters’ dictum, showers over the islands, which we were nearing fast.  At noon we were only two hundred and ten miles from Sombrero, ‘the Spanish Hat,’ a lonely island, which is here the first outlier of the New World.  We ought to have passed it by sunrise on the 16th, and by the afternoon reached St. Thomas’s, where our pleasant party would burst like a shell in all directions, and scatter its fragments about all coasts and isles—­from Demerara to Panama, from Mexico to the Bahamas.  So that day was to the crew a day of hard hot work—­of lifting and sorting goods on the main-deck, in readiness for the arrival at St. Thomas’s, and of moving forwards two huge empty boilers which had graced our spar-deck, filled with barrels of onions and potatoes, all the way from Southampton.  But in the soft hot evening hours, time was found for the usual dance on the quarter-deck, with the band under the awning, and lamps throwing fantastic shadows, and waltzing couples, and the crew clustering aft to see, while we old folks looked on, with our ‘Ludite dum lubet, pueri,’ till the captain bade the sergeant-at-arms leave the lights burning for an extra half hour; and ‘Sir Roger de Coverley’ was danced out, to the great amusement of the foreigners, at actually half-past eleven.  After which unexampled dissipation, all went off to rest, promising to themselves and their partners that they would get up at sunrise to sight Sombrero.