of corn.
If I cared to creep below the branches for two hundred yards at the risk
of meeting snakes, scorpions, and other such charming creatures, I
should find myself on the water's edge.

To ride up a mountain three thousand feet high, to be near a wonder
which I could not see after all, was not what I had proposed to myself.
There was a traveller's rest at the point where we halted, a cool damp
grotto carved into the sand-stone. We picketed our horses, cutting leafy
boughs off the trees for them, and making cushions for ourselves out of
the ferns. We were told that if we walked on for half a mile we should
see the other side of the island, and if we were lucky we might catch a
glimpse of the lake. Meanwhile clouds rolled, down off the mountains,
filled the hollow where we stood, and so wrapped us in mist, that the
question seemed rather how we were to return than whether we should
venture farther.

While we were considering what to do, we heard steps approaching through
the fog, and a party of blacks came up on their way to Roseau with a
sick companion whom they were carrying in a palanquin. We were eating
our luncheon in the grotto, and they stopped to talk to our guide and
stare at us. Two of them, a lad and a girl, came up closer to me than
good manners would have allowed if they had possessed such things; the
'I am as good as you, and you will be good enough to know it,' sort of
tone which belongs to these democratic days showing itself rather
notably in the rising generation in parts of these islands. I defended
myself with producing a sketch book and proceeding to take their
likenesses, on which they fled precipitately.

Our sandwiches finished, we were pensively consuming our cigars, I
speculating on Sir George Prevost and his party of redcoats who must
have bivouacked on that very spot, when the clouds broke and the sun
came out. The interval was likely to be a short one, so we hurried to
our feet, walked rapidly on, and at a turn of the path where a hurricane
had torn a passage through the trees, we caught a sight of our lake as
we had been told that perhaps we might do. It lay a couple of hundred
feet beneath us deep and still, winding away round a promontory under
the crags and woods of the opposite hills: they call it a crater, and I
suppose it may have been one, for the whole island shows traces of
violent volcanic disturbance, but in general a crater is a bowl, and
this was like a reach of a river,