cliffs, in strongest contrast to
the stately and precipitous southern point of St. Lucia, the
southern point of Grenada slides into the sea, the last of the true
Antilles. For Tobago, Robinson Crusoe's island, which lies away
unseen to windward, is seemingly a fragment of South America, like
the island of Trinidad, to which the steamer now ran dead south for
seventy miles.

It was on the shortest day of the year--St. Thomas's Day--at seven
in the morning (half-past eleven of English time, just as the old
women at Eversley would have been going round the parish for their
'goodying'), that we became aware of the blue mountains of North
Trinidad ahead of us; to the west of them the island of the Dragon's
Mouth; and westward again, a cloud among the clouds, the last spur
of the Cordilleras of the Spanish Main. There was South America at
last; and as a witness that this, too, was no dream, the blue water
of the Windward Islands changed suddenly into foul bottle-green.
The waters of the Orinoco, waters from the peaks of the Andes far
away, were staining the sea around us. With thoughts full of three
great names, connected, as long as civilised man shall remain, with
those waters--Columbus, Raleigh, Humboldt--we steamed on, to see
hills, not standing out, like those of the isles which we had
passed, in intense clearness of green and yellow, purple and blue,
but all shrouded in haze, like those of the Hebrides or the West of
Ireland. Onward through a narrow channel in the mountain-wall, not
a rifle-shot across, which goes by the name of the Ape's Mouth,
banked by high cliffs of dark Silurian rock--not bare, though, as in
Britain, but furred with timber, festooned with lianes, down to the
very spray of the gnawing surf. One little stack of rocks, not
thirty feet high, and as many broad, stood almost in the midst of
the channel, and in the very northern mouth of it, exposed to the
full cut of surf and trade-wind. But the plants on it, even seen
through the glasses, told us where we were. One huge low tree
covered the top with shining foliage, like that of a Portugal
laurel; all around it upright Cerei reared their gray candelabra,
and below them, hanging down the rock to the very surf, deep green
night-blowing Cereus twined and waved, looking just like a curtain
of gigantic stag's-horn moss. We ran through the channel; then amid
more low wooded islands, it may be for a mile, before a