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cultivated, an accomplished artist; a person who would have shone anywhere and in any circle, and was, there fore, contented to be herself and indifferent whether she shone or not. A visit in such a family was likely to be instructive, and was sure to be agreeable; and on these grounds alone I should have accepted gratefully the oppor tunity of knowing them better which they kindly made for me by an invitation to stay with them. But their place, which was called Cherry Garden, and which I had seen from the grounds at Government House, had a further im portance of its own in having been the house of the unfor tunate George William Gordon. The disturbances with which Mr. Gordon was connected, and for his share in which he was executed, are so recent and so notorious that I need give no detailed account of them, though, of course, I looked into the history again and listened to all that I could hear about it. Though I had taken no part in Mr. Eyre's defence, I was one of those who thought from the first that Mr. Eyre had been un worthily sacrificed to public clamour. Had the agitation in Jamaica spread, and taken the form which it easily might have taken, he would have been blamed as keenly by one half of the world if he had done nothing to check it as he was blamed, in fact, by the other for too much energy. Carlyle used to say that it was as if, when a ship had been on fire, and the captain by skill and promptitude had put the fire out, his owner were to say to him, ‘Sir, you poured too much water down the hold and damaged the cargo.’ The captain would answer, ‘ Yes, sir, but I have saved your ship. This was the view which I carried with me to Jamaica, and I have brought it back with me the same in essentials, though qualified by clearer perceptions of the real nature of the situation. Something of a very similar kind had happened in Natal just before I visited that colony in 1874. I had