The mail-steamers, if they need to go into dock, have, I am ashamed to say, to go to Martinique, where the French manage matters better.

The admirable Carenage harbour is empty; Castries remains a little town, small, dirty, dilapidated, and unwholesome; and St. Lucia itself is hardly to be called a colony, but rather the nucleus of a colony, which may become hereafter, by energy and good government, a rich and thickly-peopled garden up to the very mountain-tops.
We went up 800 feet of steep hill, to pay a visit on that Morne Fortunee which Moore and Abercrombie took, with terrible loss of life, in May 1796; and wondered at the courage and the tenacity of purpose which could have contrived to invest, and much more to assault, such a stronghold, 'dragging the guns across ravines and up the acclivities of the mountains and rocks,' and then attacking the works only along one narrow neck of down, which must be fat, to this day, with English blood.
All was peaceful enough now.

The forts were crumbling, the barracks empty, and the 'neat cottages, smiling flower gardens, smooth grass- plats and gravel-walks,' which were once the pride of the citadel, replaced for the most part with Guava-scrub and sensitive plants.

But nothing can destroy the beauty of the panorama.

To the north and east a wilderness of mountain peaks; to the west the Grand Cul- de-sac and the Carenage, mapped out in sheets of blue between high promontories; and, beyond all, the open sea.