ST. CHRISTOPHER'S.
203
covered with wood, and the trees, of which he speaks, were growing in the midst of i t ; now I have always remarked that the palm in a forest is much shorter and slenderer than when it springs up by itself or in regular and open rows. Not but that Ligon had a perfect right to tell the lie, seeing it was only within a few years that the gentry of Guiana had discontinued that barbarous fashion of wearing their heads under their arms and their eye in the middle of their breasts. For all which a better man than Ligon had pledged his reputation. But as we went round the island, though my eyes often wandered over the sea and through the trees, yet did they always return at short intervals, and fix themselves upon the sullen skyward fragment of the Mountain of Misery. I passed entirely round its base and saw it from various points of view; it changed under the shifting clouds from black to pale, and seemed to be impatient of fixure, and to be straining forward to dash itself to atoms in the chasm below. What a place for Timon to have chosen in his misanthropy ! I believe I have reason to say that there is no colony, with perhaps the exception of Grenada, where the free-coloured people are treated with so much justice as in St. Kitt's. There are instances here of respectable white and colored persons intermarrying, which is a conquest over the last and most natural of all prejudices. The only newspaper in the island