Next to these small shops, come the stores of the retail provision dealers, which are upon a larger scale, and of course better supplied with goods. Then there are the _grog shops_, as they are termed, where to the heterogeneous mass of eatables, crockery, and tin-ware, is added the more exciting articles of brandy, rum, gin, porter, wine, &c.; and where of an evening, amid fumes of every description, (from Yanky cheese to Virginia tobacco,) and dim smoky oil lamps, parties of soldiers, sailors, dingy-looking blacks, and unfortunate females—ay! and men of better rank of life, who ought to blush to be found in such places—love to congregate, and barter health and money, for dirty goblets of those fiery liquids. When passing, in an evening, these _store-houses for crime_, they forcibly bring to my mind thoughts of Pandemonium. The dusky lamps, at one moment sending forth their long flaming tongues, the next, only serving to make darkness visible; the crowds of negroes, with their gleaming eyes and glittering teeth, presenting the appearance of so many attending demons; the groups of white soldiers or sailors, looking more pallid in the flickering lamp-light, and greedily quaffing the deleterious fluid, which, sooner or later, preys upon their very vitals—and then the various sounds of cursing and quarrelling, idiotic laughter, discordant singing, and incoherent talking, as the miserable frequenters arrive at the different stages of intoxication,—conspire to render it more like a council-chamber of tormented spirits, than the self-chosen place of amusement of rational creatures. The next grade of these places of merchandise are, the merchants’ stores or warehouses, with their attached lumber-yards. These are, in most instances, large, dismal-looking buildings, whose unwashed rafters afford safe protection to innumerable spiders of every size, or present a desirable spot for the freemasons (the ichneumon bee) to erect their clayey dwellings upon. One corner of these vast emporiums is latticed off, forming a counting-house, decorated with a coat of white, green, or yellow paint, and shewing its chequers of red tape, for the purpose of sticking orders, letters, or bank-notices for payments, due at the Colonial or West India Bank. Here, on a high-legged stool, of dingy look, sits the merchant, dressed in his round, white jacket, snowy pantaloons, Panama or Paget hat; and, with pen in hand, and a pinch of _Lundy-foot_ between his fingers, (to assist his ideas, I suppose,) calculates the probabilities of his _’specs_, which in other days afforded such golden harvests as to give rise to the belief, that the streets in the West Indies were paved with doubloons and dollars.