xcellency first
barricaded the doors, then opened them and tried a speech, telling the
dear creatures how much he loved and respected them. Probably they did
not understand him, as few of them speak English. Producing no effect,
he retreated again, barred the door once more, slipped out at a back
entrance down a lane to the port, took refuge on board his steamer, and
disappeared. So the story was told me--not by the administrator, who was
not a man to turn English authority into ridicule--but by some one on
the spot, who repeated the current report of the adventure. It may be
exaggerated in some features, but it represents, at any rate, the
feeling of the place towards the head representative of the existing
government.

I will mention another incident, said to have occurred still more
recently to one of these great persons, very like what befell Sancho
Panza in Barataria. This, too, may have been wickedly turned, but it was
the subject of general talk and general amusement on board the steamers
which make the round of the Antilles. Universal belief is a fact of its
kind, and though it tends to shape itself in dramatic form more
completely than the facts justify, there is usually some truth at the
bottom of it. The telegrams to the West Indies pass through New York,
and often pick up something on the way. A warning message reached a
certain colony that a Yankee-Irish schooner with a Fenian crew was
coming down to annex the island, or at least to kidnap the governor.
This distinguished gentleman ought perhaps to have suspected that a joke
was being played upon his fears; but he was a landlord. A
governor-general had been threatened seriously in Canada, why not he in
the Antilles? He was as much agitated as Sancho himself. All these
islands were and are entirely undefended save by a police which cannot
be depended on to resist a serious invasion. They were called out.
Rumour said that in half the rifles the cartridges were found afterwards
inverted. The next day dispelled the alarm. The schooner was the
creation of some Irish telegraph clerk, and the scare ended in laughter.
But under the jest lies the wretched certainty that the Antilles have no
protection except in their own population, and so little to thank
England for that scarcely one of the inhabitants, except the officials,
would lift a finger to save the connection.

Once more, I tell these stories not as if they were authenticated facts,
but as evidence of the