Two years later she prepared the letter-press to Tahiti:  a Series of Photographs, taken by Colonel Stuart Wortley.  He also is a gentleman of much culture and noble work, in whose home we saw beautiful things gathered from many lands.

The last long trip of Sir Thomas and Lady Brassey was made in the fall of 1883, and resulted in a charming book, In the Trades, the Tropics, and the Roaring Forties, with about three hundred illustrations.  The route lay through Madeira, Trinidad, Venezuela, the Bahamas, and home by way of the Azores.  The resources of the various islands, their history, and their natural formation, are ably told, showing much study as well as intelligent observation.  The maps and charts are also valuable.  At Trinidad they visit the fine Botanic Gardens, and see bamboos, mangoes, peach-palms, and cocoa-plants, from whose seeds chocolate is made.  The quantity exported annually is 13,000,000 pounds.

They also visit great coffee plantations.  “The leaves of the coffee-shrub,” says Lady Brassey, “are of a rich, dark, glossy green; the flowers, which grow in dense white clusters, when in full bloom, giving the bushes the appearance of being covered with snow.  The berries vary in color from pale green to reddish orange or dark red, according to their ripeness, and bear a strong resemblance to cherries.  Each contains two seeds, which, when properly dried, become what is known to us as ‘raw’ coffee.”

At Caracas they view with interest the place which, on March 26, 1812, was nearly destroyed by an earthquake, twelve thousand persons perishing, thousands of whom were buried alive by the opening of the ground.  They study the formation of coral-reefs, and witness the gathering of sponges in the Bahamas.  “These are brought to the surface by hooked poles, or sometimes by diving.  When first drawn from the water they are covered with a soft gelatinous substance, as black as tar and full of organic life, the sponge, as we know, being only the skeleton of the organism.”

While all this travelling was being enjoyed, and made most useful as well, to hundreds of thousands of readers, Lady Brassey was not forgetting her works of philanthropy.  For years she has been a leading spirit in the St. John’s Ambulance Association.  Last October she gave a valuable address to the members of the “Workingmen’s Club and Institute Union,” composed of several hundred societies of workingmen.  Her desire was that each society take up the work of teaching its members how to care for the body in case of accidents.  The association, now numbering over one hundred thousand persons, is an offshoot of the ancient order of St. John of Jerusalem, founded eight hundred years ago, to maintain a hospital for Christian pilgrims.  She says:  “The method of arresting bleeding from an artery is so easy that a child may learn it; yet thousands of lives have been lost through ignorance, the life-blood ebbing away in the presence of sorrowing spectators, perfectly