In the eighteenth century Nevis was known as The Mother of the English Leeward Caribbees.  A Captain-General ruled the group in the name of the King, but if he died suddenly, his itinerant duties devolved upon the Governor of Nevis until the crown heard of its loss and made choice of another to fill that high and valued office.  She had a Council and a House of Assembly, modelled in miniature upon the Houses of Peers and Commons; and was further distinguished as possessing the only court in the English Antilles where pirates could be tried.  The Council was made up of ten members appointed by the Captain-General, but commanded by “its own particular and private Governor.”  The freeholders of the Island chose twenty-four of their number to represent them in the House of Assembly; and the few chronicles of that day agree in asserting that Nevis during her hundred proud years of supremacy was governed brilliantly and well.  But the careful administration of good laws contributed in part only to the celebrity of an Island which to-day, still British as she is, serves but as a pedestal for the greatest of American statesmen.  In these old days she was a queen as well as a mother.  Her planters were men of immense wealth and lived the life of grandees.  Their cane-fields covered the mountain on all its sides and subsidiary peaks, rising to the very fringe of the cold forest on the cone of a volcano long since extinct.  The “Great Houses,” built invariably upon an eminence that commanded a view of the neighbouring islands.—­St. Christopher, Antigua, Montserrat,—­were built of blocks of stone so square and solid and with a masonry so perfect that one views their ruins in amazement to-day.  They withstood hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and tidal waves.  They were impregnable fortresses against rioting negroes and spasmodically aggressive Frenchmen.  They even survived the abolition of slavery, and the old gay life went on for many years.  English people, bored or in search of health, came for the brilliant winter, delighted with the hospitality of the planters, and to renew their vitality in the famous climate and sulphur baths, which, of all her possessions, Time has spared to Nevis.  And then, having weathered all the ills to which even a West Indian Island can be subject, she succumbed—­to the price of sugar.  Her great families drifted away one by one.  Her estates were given over to the agent for a time, finally to the mongoose.  The magnificent stone mansions, left without even a caretaker, yielded helplessly to the diseases of age, and the first hurricane entering unbarred windows carried their roofs to the sea.  In Charles Town, the capital since the submergence of James Town in 1680, are the remains of large town houses and fine old stone walls, which one can hardly see from the roadstead, so thick are the royal palms and the cocoanut trees among the ruins, wriggling their slender bodies through every crevice and flaunting their glittering luxuriance above every broken wall.