I was always an early riser, and believe I owe much of my good health to this custom.  I used to delight in a lovely tropical morning, when, with a cigar in my mouth, I walked into the market.  What would Sir William Curtis, or Sir Charles Flower have said, could they have seen, as I did, the numbers of luxurious turtle lying on their backs, and displaying their rich calapee to the epicurean purchaser?  Well, indeed might the shade of Apicius[A] lament that America and turtle were not discovered in his days.  There were the guanas, too, in abundance, with their mouths sewed up to prevent their biting; these are excellent food, although bearing so near a resemblance to the alligator, and its diminutive European representative, the harmless lizard.  Muscovy ducks, parrots, monkeys, pigeons, and fish.  Pine apples abounded, oranges, pomegranates, limes, Bavarias, plantains, love apples, Abbogada pears (better known by the name of subaltern’s butter), and many other fruits, all piled in heaps, were to be had at a low price.  Such was the stock of a New Providence market.

[Footnote A:  Lyttleton’s “Dialogues of the Dead.”]

Of the human species, buyers and vendors, there were black, brown and fair; from the fairest skin, with light blue eyes, and flaxen hair, to the jet-black “Day and Martin” of Ethiopia; from the loveliest form of Nature’s mould, to the disgusting squaw, whose flaccid mammae hung like inverted bottles to her girdle, or are extended over her shoulder to give nourishment to the little imp perched on her back; and here the urchin sits the live long day, while the mother performs all the drudgery of the field, the house, or the market.

The confusion of Babel did not surpass the present gabble of a West India market.  The loud and everlasting chatter of the black women, old and young (for black ladies can talk as well as white ones); the screams of children, parrots, and monkeys; black boys and girls, clad a la Venus, white teeth, red lips, black skins, and elephant legs, formed altogether a scene well worth looking at; and now, since the steamers have acquired so much velocity, I should think would not be an unpleasant lounge for the fastidious ennuye of France or England.  The beauty and coolness of the morning, the lovely sky, and the cheerfulness of the slaves, whom our morbid philanthropists wish to render happy, by making discontented, would altogether amply repay the trouble and expense of a voyage, to those who have leisure or money enough to enable them to visit the tropical islands.

The delightful, and, indeed, indispensable amusement of bathing, is particularly dangerous in these countries.  In the shallows you are liable to be struck by the stingray, a species of skate, with a sharp barb about the middle of its tail; and the effect of the wound is so serious, that I have known a person to be in a state of frenzy from it for nearly forty-eight hours.  In deeper water, the sharks are not only numerous