That is the sort of scene which makes a deep impression on the mind; far deeper than the ordinary, less romantic, everyday thing which shows the real state of an island in the statistical sense. Of course, even in the transition period one only found melodrama like this in rare patches. More truly typical was Ferndale, for instance, an estate about fifteen miles away from Derby Hill. Only the overseer’s house here remained: the Big House had altogether collapsed and been smothered over. It consisted of a ground floor of stone, given over to goats and the children, and a first floor of wood, the inhabited part, reached from outside by a double flight of wooden steps. When the earthquakes came the upper part only slid about a little, and could be jacked back into position with big levers. The roof was of shingles: after very dry weather it leaked like a sieve, and the first few days of the rainy season would be spent in a perpetual general-post of beds and other furniture to escape the drips, until the wood swelled. The people who lived there at the time I have in mind were the Bas-Thorntons: not natives of the Island, ‘Creoles,’ but a family from England. Mr. Bas-Thornton had a business of some kind in St. Anne’s, and used to ride there every day on a mule. He had such long legs that his stunted mount made him look rather ridiculous: and being quite as temperamental as a mule himself, a quarrel between the two was generally worth watching. Close to the dwelling were the ruined grinding and boiling houses. These two are never quite cheek by jowl: the grinding-house is set on higher ground, with a water-wheel to turn the immense iron vertical rollers. From these the cane juice runs down a wedge-shaped trough to the boiling house, where a negro stands and rinses a little lime-wash into it with a grass brush to make it granulate. Then it is emptied into big copper vats, over furnaces burning faggots and ‘trash,’ or squeezed-out cane. There a few negroes stand, skimming the poppling vats with long-handled copper ladles, while their friends sit round, eating sugar or chewing trash, in a mist of hot vapour. What they skim off oozes across the floor with an admixture of a good deal of filth--insects, even rats, and whatever sticks to negroes’ feet--into another basin, thence to be distilled into rum. This, at any rate, is how it used to be done. I know nothing of modern methods--or if there are any, never having visited the island since 1860, which is a long time ago now.