that ’death has occurred from eating it in many cases immediately, and in some recorded instances even before the fish was swallowed.’  Yet a species caught with this, and only differing from it (if indeed it be distinct) by having a yellow spot instead of a black one on the gill-cover, is harmless.  Mr. Hill attributes the poisonous quality, in many cases, to the foul food which the fish get from coral reefs, such as the Formigas bank, midway between Cuba, Hayti, and Jamaica, where, as you ’approach it from the east, you find the cheering blandness of the sea-breeze suddenly changing to the nauseating smell of a fish-market.’  There, as off similar reefs in the Bahamas and round Anegada, as we’ll as at one end of St. Kitts, the fish are said to be all poisonous.  If this theory be correct, the absence of coral reefs round Trinidad may help to account for the fact stated by Mr. Joseph, that poisonous fish are unknown in that island.  The statement, however, is somewhat too broadly made; for the Chouf-chouf, {103a} a prickly fish which blows itself out like a bladder, and which may be seen hanging in many a sailor’s cottage in England, is as evil-disposed in Trinidad as elsewhere.  The very vultures will not eat it; and while I was in the island a family of Coolies, in spite of warning, contrived to kill themselves with the nasty vermin:  the only one who had wit enough to refuse it being an idiot boy.

These islands of the Bocas, three in number, are some two miles long each, and some eight hundred to one thousand feet in height; at least, so say the surveyors.  To the eye, as is usual in the Tropics, they look much lower.  One is inclined here to estimate hills at half, or less than half, their actual height; and that from causes simple enough.  Not only does the intense clearness of the atmosphere make the summits appear much nearer than in England; but the trees on the summit increase the deception.  The mind, from home association, supposes them to be of the same height as average English trees on a hill-top—­say fifty feet—­and estimates, rapidly and unconsciously, the height of the mountain by that standard.  The trees are actually nearer a hundred and fifty than fifty feet high; and the mountain is two or three times as big as it looks.

But it is not their height, nor the beauty of their outline, nor the size of the trunks which still linger on them here and there, which gives these islands their special charm.  It is their exquisite little land-locked southern coves—­places to live and die in—­

‘The world forgetting, by the world forgot.’