mile round, and only accessible at a point to the leeward, and even
then only when there is no surf. He who lands, it is said, has then
to creep through crannies and dangerous steeps, round to the
windward side, where the eye is suddenly relieved by a sloping grove
of wild fig-trees, clinging by innumerable air-roots to the cracks
of the stone.

So Hood, with that inspiration of genius so common then among
sailors, laid his seventy-four, the Centaur, close alongside the
Diamond; made a hawser, with a traveller on it, fast to the ship and
to the top of the rock; and in January 1804 got three long 24's and
two 18's hauled up far above his masthead by sailors who, as they
'hung like clusters,' appeared 'like mice hauling a little sausage.
Scarcely could we hear the Governor on the top directing them with
his trumpet; the Centaur lying close under, like a cocoa-nut shell,
to which the hawsers are affixed.' {36} In this strange fortress
Lieutenant James Wilkie Maurice (let his name be recollected as one
of England's forgotten worthies) was established, with 120 men and
boys, and ammunition, provisions, and water, for four months; and
the rock was borne on the books of the Admiralty as His Majesty's
ship Diamond Rock, and swept the seas with her guns till the 1st of
June 1805, when she had to surrender, for want of powder, to a
French squadron of two 74's, a frigate, a corvette, a schooner, and
eleven gunboats, after killing and wounding some seventy men on the
rock alone, and destroying three gunboats, with a loss to herself of
two men killed and one wounded. Remembering which story, who will
blame the traveller if he takes off his hat to His Majesty's quondam
corvette, as he sees for the first time its pink and yellow sides
shining in the sun, above the sparkling seas over which it
domineered of old? You run onwards toward St. Lucia. Across that
channel Rodney's line of frigates watched for the expected
reinforcement of the French fleet. The first bay in St. Lucia is
Gros islet; and there is the Gros islet itself--Pigeon Rock, as the
English call it--behind which Rodney's fleet lay waiting at anchor,
while he himself sat on the top of the rock, day after day, spy-
glass in hand, watching for the signals from his frigates that the
French fleet was on the move.

And those glens and forests of St. Lucia--over them and through them
Sir John Moore and Sir Ralph Abercrombie fought, we