elor, or widower; and even then he is as
likely to get a ducking as to have fine weather.

During a tropical dry season, on the contrary, a journey of two hundred
miles may be safely undertaken, without any of these encumbrances; with
two or three clean shirts, a man may scamper about for months, like a
Roman light-infantryman, "impedimentis relictis," unless he should be so
ill advised as to carry his wife and children with him.

Throughout the rainy season, many diseases arise, and make great
destruction among those who remain on the sea-coast; those who can
afford it, retreat to the more salubrious mountain regions, while, as
aforesaid, those who stay behind, being generally the poor, the
worthless, and the useless part of the community, fall victims to the
numerous diseases generated by the excessive rains, and the then swampy
condition of the country. This annual purgation of society, is perhaps
another blessing of a tropical country. I know of more than one
community, whose moral, and in some measure physical health, would in my
mere mortal and short sighted notion of the fitness of things, be vastly
benefited by the visitation of an energetic, wide sweeping epidemic.
Human society is very like a grate full of ignited anthracite coal,
those parts of it that have lost their combustibility, and become
worthless, are constantly filtering down through the bottom of the
grate; and so in society, those individuals, who are daily falling from
a state of grace in the eyes of their fellow-worms, either as regards
fashion, or property, or reputation, go to swell the number of the
outcasts from the ranks of "good society;" a convenient phrase that has
recently been invented, and signifies the speaker's own particular
friends and acquaintances, though he and they may be at that very
moment getting out stone on Blackwell's Island. So you see, reader, that
it is fore-ordained, for I am a good deal of a fatalist, that one of the
ingredients of civilized society should be a certain proportion of poor
miserable devils, such as you and I both know.

It was just at the close of the rainy season, when Nature looked
infinitely better and fresher for having her face washed, though she had
been six months about it; the air seemed purer and more healthful, and
the sky looked clearer and of a richer blue, for the half year's
drenching; it was at this particular time of the year, that we have
thought proper to raise the curtain, and intr