he unexpected shapes in which the schoolmaster
is appearing among the blacks. An intimation was brought to him on his
arrival that, as the Athenian journeymen had played Pyramus and Thisbe
at the nuptials of Theseus and Hippolyta, so a party of villagers from
the interior of Tobago would like to act before his Excellency. Of
course he consented. They came, and went through their performance. To
Mr. S----'s, and probably to the reader's astonishment, the play which
they had selected was the 'Merchant of Venice.' Of the rest of it he
perhaps thought, like the queen of the Amazons, that it was 'sorry
stuff;' but Shylock's representative, he said, showed real appreciation.
With freedom and a peasant proprietary, the money lender is a necessary
phenomenon, and the actor's imagination may have been assisted by
personal recollections.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] I have been told that this picture is overdrawn, that Grenada is the
most prosperous of the Antilles, that its exports are increasing, that
English owners are making large profits again, that the blacks are
thriving beyond example, that there are twenty guns in the Fort, that
the wharves and Quay are in perfect condition, that there are no
roofless warehouses, that in my description of St. George's I must have
been asleep or dreaming. I can only repeat and insist upon what I myself
saw. I know very well that in parts of the island a few energetic
English gentlemen are cultivating their land with remarkable success.
Any enterprising Englishman with capital and intelligence might do the
same. I know also that in no part of the West Indies are the blacks
happier or better off. But notwithstanding the English interest in the
Island has sunk to relatively nothing. Once Englishmen owned the whole
of it. Now there are only thirty English estates. There are five
thousand peasant freeholds, owned almost entirely by coloured men, and
the effect of the change is written upon the features of the harbour.
Not a vessel of any kind was to be seen in it. The great wooden jetty
where cargoes used to be landed, or taken on board, was a wreck, the
piles eaten through, the platform broken. On the Quay there was no sign
of life, or of business, the houses along the side mean and
insignificant, while several large and once important buildings,
warehouses, custom houses, dwelling houses, or whatever they had been,
were lying in ruins, tropical trees growing in the courtyards, and
tropical creepers cl