From what we have written, it would appear that though smuggling on an extensive scale belongs more to past than to present days, yet the same spirit still exists among people, otherwise honest enough, whose education and social position ought to free them from thieving propensities. It is almost against human nature to expect that revenue frauds will ever be thoroughly eradicated while the present high duties on special commodities are maintained. The duty on tobacco, for instance, amounting to five times its value, makes it one of the greatest temptations to seamen. Most strenuous efforts on the part of the Customs’ authorities and shipowners have been made to eradicate the traffic, yet every now and then a successful detection—which represents three or four successful evasions—occurs, which shows that the spirit of smuggling is difficult to conquer. IN ALL SHADES. BY GRANT ALLEN, AUTHOR OF ‘BABYLON,’ ‘STRANGE STORIES,’ ETC. ETC. CHAPTER XXIII. The governor’s dance was the great event of the Trinidad season—the occasion to which every girl in the whole island looked forward for months with the intensest interest. And it was also a great event to Dr Whitaker; for it was the one time and place, except the Hawthorns’ drawing-room, where he could now meet Nora Dupuy on momentary terms of seeming equality. In the eye of the law, even in Trinidad, white men, black men, and brown men are all equal; and under the governor’s roof, as became the representative of law and order in the little island, there were no invidious distinctions of persons between European and negro. Every well-to-do inhabitant, irrespective of cuticular peculiarities, was duly bidden to the governor’s table: ebony and ivory mingled freely together once in a moon at the governor’s At Homes and dances. And Dr Whitaker had made up his mind that on that one solitary possible occasion he would venture on his sole despairing appeal to Nora Dupuy, and stand or fall by her final answer.