We bought and tasted of almost every kind of native fruit; some of it was very curious to look at, and some was very good to eat. The sappadillo is a small round fruit, the color of a potato on the outside, and as sweet as sugared honey inside. The grapefruit has the flavor and taste of an orange, and is a rich and juicy fruit for a hot day, but the skin and pulp must be avoided. Guavas are fragrant and luscious. Jamaica apples, which are masses of sweet custard, covered with a thin skin, are almost too rich for a novice in West Indian fruits. Mangoes are said to be delicious, but they ripen later in the season. The sour-sop is a great green fruit, like a bloated cucumber, and has been aptly compared, in regard to taste, to cotton soaked in vinegar. The lemons are enormous and very fine, and there are limes, and star-apples, and tamarinds, and other things of the kind which I cannot remember. But the fruits we liked best were those to which we had been accustomed, oranges, pine-apples and bananas. We had not, however, been accustomed to pine-apples naturally ripened. Those sent from Nassau to the United States are shipped in a partially green state, and ripen themselves as well as circumstances allow. But a pine-apple ripened in its native soil, and under its native sun, was an unknown joy to us. It was not the pineapple season, but in this happy climate season does not make much difference to fruits, and there were generally some pine-apples to be had.

Not only venders of merchandise but every one who has any means of making money out of the visitors is to be found at this hotel-door

market,-men with horses and carriages to hire; captains of sail-boats; humbler folk who will take you rowing, or commanders of fishing-smacks anxious to take a fishing party "outside." As soon as possible I engaged a man to take me fishing.

I have always delighted in the sport, and here I should certainly have some new experiences. We started after breakfast, myself and the fisherman, in a tight little, round little, dirty little sloop, with a "well" in it to keep captured fish alive, and decked over fore and aft. The boat was strong and safe, if not very pretty, and away we went over the bar and out to sea. We anchored off Hog Island, some distance from land, and my good man lowered his sail and got out his lines and bait. The latter was conchmeat. He took up a conch, several of which he had bought in the market before we started, and broke the shell to pieces with a small iron bar. Then he pulled out the inmate, which resembles an immense clam with a beak and a tail, and examined it for pearls. In these conchs, pearls of a pretty pinkish hue are occasionally, but not often, found by fortunate fishermen and divers. One of them sold for four hundred dollars in London, I was informed. Small

SELLING A TARANTULA.

ones, worth from ten to a hundred dollars, are occasionally seen in the Nassau shops. Finding no pearl, my fisherman laid his conch on the deck and hammered it with a wooden beater until it was soft enough to cut up for the hooks. All this made a good

deal of noise, which I was afraid would frighten away the fish, but when the hooks were baited and we were ready to commence operations, the man took an old and empty conch-shell, and holding it over the water

FORT FINCASTLE.

hammered it into bits, making as much noise as possible in so doing. This, he said, and he seemed to know all about it, was to attract the fish. These proceedings were very different from what I had been accustomed to in my fishing excursions at home, when everybody kept as quiet as possible, but my fisherman's next move astonished me still more. He coolly remarked that he would look and see if there were any fish in the water about our boat. We were gently tossing on waves that were entirely different from the transparent water of the harbor, and apparently as opaque as any other waves. I could see a few inches below the surface perhaps, but certainly no more. But my man knew what he was talking about. From under his little

deck he drew forth a "water-glass," which is a light wooden box, about twenty inches long and a foot square, open at one end, and with a pane of glass inserted at the other end, which is somewhat the larger.

He held this box over the side of the boat, and sinking the glass end a few inches below the surface of the water, he put his eye to the other end and looked in. -"Yes," said he, "there's lots of fish down there. Take a look at them." I took the box and looked down into the water, which was five or six fathoms deep. I could see everything under the water as plainly as if it had all been in the upper air,the smooth white sandy bottom; the stones lying on it, covered with sea-weed; the star-fish and such sea-creatures lying perfectly still, or gently waving themselves about, and the big fish slowly swimming around and occasionally turning up one eye to look at us. Looking through this "water-glass," it was as light as day down under the sea.

The fisherman, who was of white blood, although he was tanned as dark as a mulatto, knew all the different fish and told me their names. The "muttonfish" and the "groupers" were the largest we saw. Some of these were two or three feet long. We now lowered our lines and began to fish. The man kept the water-glass in his hand most of the time, so as to see what would come to the lines. Sometimes I would take a look and see the fish come slowly swimming up to my bait, which rested on the bottom, look at it, and perhaps take a little nibble, and then disdainfully swim away. They did not seem to be very hungry. Pretty soon the fisherman caught a "hind,"'-a fish about a foot long, of a beautiful orange color with red and black spots. I soon caught one of the same kind. Then the man hauled up a "blue-fish," one of the very handsomest fishes I ever saw. It was not at all like our so-called blue-fish. This was about twenty inches long and of a beautiful polished, dark sky-blue all overfins, head, tail and every other part. It was more like a very bright blue china-fish than anything else.

While we were fishing, we saw, at a short distance, some conch-divers at work. There were two of them, and neither of them wore any clothes. One of them sculled their small boat, while the other fellow stood like a bronze statue in the bow. Every now and then they would stop and look into the sea with a water-glass, and if they saw a conch, over would go the diver into eight or ten fathoms of water and bring it up. It seemed like a very lonely kind of business, to go away off on the sea in a little bit of a boat and then to leave even that, and dive down into the ocean depths, among the quiet fishes and the solemn rocks, for a three-cent conch. I asked my fisherman if there were sharks hereabouts.

66

"Plenty of 'em," he answered; sometimes they come around my boat and snap at my fish as fast as I catch 'em. They soon break the lines and make me pull up and get away. Yes, there's lots of 'em, but they wont bite a nigger."

We soon became convinced that February is June in Nassau. The weather was that of early summer, and everybody was in light clothes and straw hats. In the sun it is often quite warm; in the shade you can generally rely on seventy-four degrees. We never found it too warm to go about sight-seeing, and there is a good deal to see in and about Nassau, if you choose to go and look at it. Back of the hotel, on a commanding hill, stands Fort Fincastle, a curious old stronghold. Viewed from the front, it looks very much like a side-wheel steamer built of stone. The flag-staff increases the delusion by its resemblance to a fore-mast. This fort was built long before steamboats were heard of, so that the idea that it is a petrified steamer is utterly ridiculous.

The fort is commanded and garrisoned by one man whose duty it is to signal the approach of vessels. He must have had a lively time, during our late war, when so many blockade-runners came to Nassau, and when a steamer might come rushing into the harbor with a gun-boat hot behind it-at any time of day or night.

Fort Charlotte, at the western end of the town, is a good place to go to, if you like

mysterious underground passages, deep, solemn and dark chambers, cut out of the solid rock, and all sorts of uncanny and weird places, where a negro with a doublebarreled lamp leads you through the darkness. In this fort, which was built by the Earl of Dunmore, nearly a hundred years ago, there is a curious deep well, with circular stairs leading to the bottom of it, and the stairs, central pillar and well are all cut out of the solid rock. We went down that dismal well, slowly and cautiously, and we found at the bottom a long passage which led to the "Governor's room." There was no governor there, for the fort is now deserted, except by a couple of negroes, who help the Fincastle man to look out for vessels, but it must have been a very good place for a governor to go to, if his subjects did not love him.

The military element is quite conspicuous in Nassau. There are large barracks at the west end of the town; a British man-of-war generally lies in the harbor, and in the cool of the evening you may almost always see, down the white vista of the narrow street, the red coat of a British soldier.

There is a nice little public square which lies on the water side of Bay street and fronts the public buildings, where are the court-houses, house of assembly, Bank, and other similar places of resort. Whenever we would go on a pleasant morning, afternoon or evening-to this square, to sit by the stone boat-stairs, or to stand on the sea-wall and view the lovely water with its changing hues of green, its yachts, its ships, and all its busy smaller craft, and sniff with delight the cool salt breeze that blows so gayly over the narrow back of Hog Island, there would certainly come running to us two, three, or a dozen little black boys with the entreaty: "Please, boss, give us a small dive." If I happened to have any change, and wished to see some funny work in the water, I put my hand in my pocket, and instantly every little black boy jerked off his shirt. It is no trouble for the negro children to undress in Nassau. The very little ones wear only a small shirt and a straw hat. Sometimes there is not much muslin in this shirt, but they are always particular to have it come down low enough to cover the breast-bone. If I find a penny, I toss it into the water, and instantly every darkey boy, clad in nothing but his scanty trowsers, plunges in after it. Sometimes a spry little fellow catches the coin before it reaches the bot

tom, and it is never long before some fellow comes up with the money in his mouth. Sometimes when a coin is not readily found, it is curious to look down through the clear water and see the young rascals moving their legs and arms about down at the bottom like a lot of enormous brown frogs.

There are not many places of public resort in Nassau; but there is a library which has eight sides and six thousand books, and where the pleasant young people of Nassau-and there are a great many of them-go to see one another, and to look over the volumes in the cool alcoves.

There is another place which always looks delightfully cool and shady, and which, if it is not patronized by lovers, ought to be, and this is a very long, narrow and deep ravine which was cut in the lime-stone rock, not far from the hotel, many years ago by the people who were building the town. At the upper end is a long flight of steps leading to the hill on which Fort Fincastle stands, and this is called "The Queen's Staircase." It has been long since any stone has been taken from this ravine. The stairs, which were admirably

cut out of the rock, have been worn away in places by many feet, and the whole place has grown up cool and green, with all sorts of vines and shrubbery. Here we found a great many of the "life-leaf" plant,—a curious growth, from the fact that a leaf of it will live for months, pinned to your wall, and not only that, but little plants will come out of the edges of the leaf and grow just as comfortably as if they were in the ground.

It is genuine pleasure to take a ride about Nassau. Apart from the fact that there is a good deal to be seen, it is delightful to ride over roads which are so hard, so smooth, and so level that it does not seem to be any trouble whatever for a horse to pull a buggy. If it were any trouble, I don't believe the Nassau horses would do it.

The first time we took a buggy-ride, our little mite of a horse bowled us along at a lively rate, and all was charming-fine breeze, lovely road by the water, suburbs fading into country, and all that-until we met a wagon. Then we came very near having a smash-up. For some reason or other, myself and the other driver turned right into each other. We pulled up in time to prevent damage; the other man swore,

and, jerking his horse around, drove off angrily. I could not imagine why this should have happened, until I suddenly remembered that this was, theoretically, English soil, and on English soil drivers. turn to the left. It was well I thought of this and remembered it, or else on our return, when we met all the fashionable people of Nassau taking their afternoon air on the road, I should have run into the governor's carriage containing some of his family; then, in a few minutes, into the governor himself, riding rapidly on a fine horse, and after that into a number of ladies and gentlemen in buggies or one-horse barouches. Some of those in buggies were visitors from the hotel, and very difficult to avoid, having a habit of turning sometimes one way and sometimes the other.

The governor, who resides in the government house, a spacious building on the heights back of the city, is a tall, handsome Englishman, who has filled his present post for about two years to the satisfaction of everybody, I believe, excepting those enterprising people who wish to revive the old business of wrecking, for which the Bahamas used to be so famous. It is certain that there are very few islands which are so advantageously placed for this sort of business; for it is not only difficult for ships sailing in these waters to keep at a safe distance from the twenty-nine islands, the six hundred and sixty-one cays, and the two thousand three hundred and eighty-seven rocks, but there is a constant temptation to skippers to run a vessel ashore and share with the wreckers the salvage money. Then, too, it is so much more enjoyable (to wreckers) to see a vessel smash her sides on a coral reef than to see her sail stupidly into port that any one who endeavors to persuade these people that it will be better for all parties to give up the time-honored business of wrecking and devote themselves to raising oranges and pine-apples, has a hard task before him.

The principal road on the island runs along the northern shore for fifteen miles or more, and is a beautiful drive, for the most part along the edge of the harbor. This was the road we took on our first ride, and among the curious things we saw on the way was a banyan-tree. There it stood by the roadside, the regular banyan of the geographies, with its big trunk in the middle and all its little trunks coming down from the branches above. I always thought of the banyan as an East Indian tree, and

did not expect to find it in the Bahamas. However, there are not many of these trees on the island, I believe, of the size and symmetry of this one.

There are a good many trees of distinction in and about Nassau. In the garden of the Rev. Mr. Swann, rector of the cathedral, there are two very fine royal African palms, and back of the public buildings is a "silk cotton-tree" which is a wonderful specimen of what Nature can do when she tries her hand at curious vegetation. This tree, which is inclosed by a fence to protect it from visitors, is nothing very remarkable, as to its upper works, so to speak, except that it bears a pod which contains a silky cotton, but it is very remarkable indeed when one considers its roots. These stand up out of the ground six or eight feet high, like great wooden walls, radiating from the trunk ten or twenty feet outward, making an arrangement somewhat resembling a small, circular church with highbacked pews. The branches extend outward for a great distance, making this the most imposing tree on the island, although