over the starboard bow when the helm is ported, and only over the port bow when the helm is starboarded. In order to guard against the risk of the reflector being carelessly worked by not completing its sweep either way, the instrument is provided with two tell-tale bells, which will enable the officer on the bridge to check the working of the reflector. In foggy weather, when the light would be ineffective, two steam whistles can be shunted into action by the reflector handle, one giving off a succession of short shrill notes, the other a succession of deep long notes, according as the helm is to starboard or port. This invention has been awarded a medal at three Exhibitions, including the Inventories; while Admiral Bedford Pim, one of the nautical jurors, has styled it an ‘excellent course indicator.’ IN ALL SHADES. CHAPTER IV. It was a brilliant, cloudless, tropical day at Agualta Estate, Trinidad; and the cocoa-nut palms in front of the pretty, picturesque, low-roofed bungalow were waving gracefully in the light sea-breeze that blew fresh across the open cane-pieces from the distant horizon of the broad Atlantic. Most days, indeed, except during the rainy season, were brilliant enough in all conscience at beautiful Agualta: the sun blazed all day long in a uniform hazy-white sky, not blue, to be sure, as in a northern climate, but bluish and cloudless; and the sea shone below hazy-white, in the dim background, beyond the waving palm-trees, and the broad-leaved bananas, and the long stretch of bright-green cane-pieces that sloped down in endless succession towards the beach and the breakers. Agualta House itself was perched, West India fashion, on the topmost summit of a tall and lonely rocky peak, a projecting spur or shoulder from the main mass of the Trinidad mountains. They chose the very highest and most beautiful situations they could find for their houses, those old matter-of-fact West Indian planters, not so much out of a taste for scenery—for their mental horizon was for the most part bounded by rum and sugar—but because a hilltop was coolest and breeziest, and coolness is the one great practical desideratum in a West Indian residence. Still, the houses that they built on these airy heights incidentally enjoyed the most exquisite prospects; and Agualta itself was no exception to the general rule in this matter. From the front piazza you looked down upon a green ravine, crowded with tree-ferns and other graceful tropical vegetation; on either side, rocky peaks broke the middle distance with their jagged tors and precipitous needles; while far away beyond the cane-grown plain that nestled snugly in the hollow below, the sky-line of the Atlantic bounded the view, with a dozen sun-smit rocky islets basking like great floating whales upon the gray horizon. No lovelier view in the whole of luxuriant beautiful Trinidad than that from the creeper-covered front piazza of the white bungalow of old Agualta.