ce which had been exerted. Eighty
miles to windward lies Barbadoes. All Saturday a heavy cannonading
had been heard to the eastward. The English and French fleets were
surely engaged. The soldiers were called out; the batteries manned:
but the cannonade died away, and all went to bed in wonder. On the
1st of May the clocks struck six: but the sun did not, as usual in
the tropics, answer to the call. The darkness was still intense,
and grew more intense as the morning wore on. A slow and silent
rain of impalpable dust was falling over the whole island. The
Negroes rushed shrieking into the streets. Surely the last day was
come. The white folk caught (and little blame to them) the panic;
and some began to pray who had not prayed for years. The pious and
the educated (and there were plenty of both in Barbadoes) were not
proof against the infection. Old letters describe the scene in the
churches that morning as hideous--prayers, sobs, and cries, in
Stygian darkness, from trembling crowds. And still the darkness
continued, and the dust fell.

I have a letter, written by one long since dead, who had at least
powers of description of no common order, telling how, when he tried
to go out of his house upon the east coast, he could not find the
trees on his own lawn, save by feeling for their stems. He stood
amazed not only in utter darkness, but in utter silence. For the
trade-wind had fallen dead; the everlasting roar of the surf was
gone; and the only noise was the crashing of branches, snapped by
the weight of the clammy dust. He went in again, and waited. About
one o'clock the veil began to lift; a lurid sunlight stared in from
the horizon: but all was black overhead. Gradually the dust-cloud
drifted away; the island saw the sun once more; and saw itself
inches deep in black, and in this case fertilising, dust. The
trade-wind blew suddenly once more out of the clear east, and the
surf roared again along the shore.

Meanwhile, a heavy earthquake-wave had struck part at least of the
shores of Barbadoes. The gentleman on the east coast, going out,
found traces of the sea, and boats and logs washed up, some 10 to 20
feet above high-tide mark: a convulsion which seems to have gone
unmarked during the general dismay.

One man at least, an old friend of John Hunter, Sir Joseph Banks and
others their compeers, was above the dismay, and the superstitious
panic which accom