‘… The weather has been very boisterous since I have been here: people say that they should have called the night of Friday 17th [January] a hurricane, if it had been in August or September…. I don’t know whether I may lay any blame on the weather, but certainly my cough has made no progress for the better since I landed. I don’t mean that I am worse, for I certainly have gained flesh, but my cough is exactly where it was when I first got into the warm latitudes: an improvement on what it was in England, but no more. The temperature of the air is quite delightful, but there is nothing to interest one out-of-doors: horridly ugly faces, most uninteresting scenery, an extremely shabby town, the population of which may, in point of morals, be called almost the sink of humanity; and then the vulgar names of all the places (I forget them as fast as I hear them), and money-making associations, which intrude into everything one sees and hears, offer a sad contrast to last winter’s work. But I don’t mention this out of grumbling, only as a reason why I am not more out-of-doors: the fact is, I spend my time in-doors very agreeably indeed. The Bishop stands very high in my estimation as a man of imperturbable equanimity among great trials to his temper, and the footing on which all his clergy are with him is a model. … The Bishop’s library is capital――much better than I expected; and as the daily expectation of setting off on the Visitation has kept me from going to work on anything regular, I have been dipping about, to my great amusement. … They say that if the growth of sugar were discontinued the island would produce sustenance enough for a very much larger population, almost without any cultivation. The vegetation is really wonderful. The guinea corn grows near fifteen feet high: and in the sugar crop there seems to be a mass of solid vegetable matter thrown up, as much as there is in a copse of ten years’ growth. It is an impenetrable thicket of rank iris: the cane part is just like the knotty root of an iris straightened out, and rising six or seven feet out of the ground; its colour is the richest yellow-green that can be conceived.