have almost reached the summit when he, like his messmates, was seen to stop, stagger, throw up his arms, and drop. So the local people tell visitors to St. Lucia to this day. What was it? What made the men fall dead so suddenly? How they met their death no man ever knew. Few human feet besides theirs, if indeed any, have ever tried to scale the Pitons, and the bones of Rodney's sailors lie up there on the windy height as they fell--what the weather and a hundred and twenty years' exposure in the open has left of them. Was it sunstroke? Local opinion attributes their fate to another cause. The Pitons, like the whole island of St. Lucia itself, are known to swarm with venomous serpents, the deadly _fer de lance_--'perhaps the deadliest snake in the world' it has been called--an ugly monster, in average length from 3 to 5 feet, as thick as a boy's wrist, of a dull red or reddish-yellow colour, fiercely aggressive in its ways, ever ready to strike at sight, and its bite practically instant death. _Craspedocephalus_--the name in itself is almost enough to kill--would account for everything. Whatever the cause really was, at any rate the Grand Piton has ever since kept its secret to itself. At Fort Royal, meanwhile, everybody, from the great French Admiral De Grasse himself down to the smallest _mousse_, was in the highest spirits and assured of victory. To one and all the hour was at hand for the development of the grand scheme that was to lay all the West Indies at the feet of France. Hardly a finer fleet, perhaps, had ever assembled under a French admiral than that lying there at that moment in attendance on the orders of De Grasse. There were thirty-four ships of the line, the finest men-of-war in the French navy among them, and their captains were some of the smartest and most dashing and most highly trained officers that ever trod a French quarter-deck. A specially interesting set they were, as it happened, in many ways. [Illustration: THE COUNT DE GRASSE (From the Portrait in Hennequin's _Biographie Maritime_)]