My recollection of Martinique and Guadaloupe bring them back to me as lovely green islands of volcanic outline.  The former especially struck me as being exceedingly picturesque, its hills covered with pleasant-looking habitations with the peaks of the Carbet veiled in the dark clouds brought by the trade winds, for background.  I had to review the troops on the Savana, the promenade of Fort Royal, but I confess I took more interest in the costume of the beautiful quadroons, or quarterbred mulatto women, than in the review itself.  This costume is worth describing.  A brilliant-coloured bandanna, knotted round the head in the most fanciful manner, no stays of course, nothing but an embroidered chemise, showing a magnificent outline, and a bright-coloured skirt, yellow or rose-coloured, trained at the back, but gathered up on one side, to show a beautiful bare leg.  When I add that these women often have a creamy white complexion which many a European would envy, the proud exclamation of the old householder, dragged I know not why before a court of justice, will be appreciated.  To the Judge’s question “What is your profession?” he replied “My profession!  I keep up the supply of Mulattos!” “Je fais des mulatres!” It was in the days of the greatest prosperity of our beautiful Antilles that the old boaster spoke.  When I arrived, this was already on the wane, and it really was tiresome not to be allowed to talk about anything but sugar and emancipation by the Creoles.

Nowadays what we call progress has done its work, and these colonies, which used to be an element of national wealth, employing a whole navy of merchantmen, and which served as nursery for the sailors of our warships, are now no more than machines for electing Radical Deputies, and thus increasing the number of agents of the national destruction.

At Martinique, we joined the flag of the admiral in command of the station.  I have served under many admirals, one more eccentric than the other.  One of the first, an excellent seaman, had one passion only, music—­and his instrument was the double bass.  He spent his time performing solos on this cumbrous instrument, which he would then put away in a small apartment known in the old-fashioned navy as la bouteille.  Sometimes the sea-water came through the port, and flooded everything.  When the admiral fetched his double bass out, and began his tunes, he would notice from the sound that the body was full of water, and then every sort of dodge would be resorted to, to get the liquid poured out by the sound holes.  The poor admiral!  There is a story that his double bass was victim one day of the spite of certain seamen, who marked their displeasure by pouring something less clean than sea-water into the big fiddle.  This same gallant admiral having gone ashore once upon a time, at St. Louis in Senegal, and finding the bar there continued so impassable that he could not rejoin his ship, sent her round to Goree, and went there himself overland slung under a camel’s belly, and armed with an umbrella,—­which proved his complete ignorance of the miracles of the Prophet Mohammed.