Tropical nature is indeed an enchantress; but she does more than bewitch, she transforms body and soul. She satisfies the senses, and numbs the aspirations; she lulls the higher faculties to sleep while gratifying, as nowhere else, the physical wants of life. It has been often said that human happiness has a certain fixed measure in all conditions of existence: the quality may vary, the capacity for each individual remains the same. Such a belief would seem to have its confirmation in the conditions of tropical society. The pleasures of intellectual life become almost impossible in a climate where the least mental effort provokes drowsiness, and the middle of each day is devoted to sleep; nor can the dazzling spectacle of tropical vegetation under tropical skies wholly compensate the enervating effect of an atmosphere hot and heavy as the air of a Turkish bath. Social existence, so circumstanced, becomes of necessity both indolent and provincial; and the enchantment of the tropics should prove irresistible only to strangers able and willing to dream life away, and to abandon all gifts of civilization so hardly earned by Northern struggle. And one must know this, to guess how far from enviable is the life of white women even in the English tropics, where there is at least an effort to maintain the social customs of the mother country. But in the old Latin colonies of the Pacific and the West Indies, woman's life has always been narrowed by formal customs which no American or English girl could well resign herself to endure. II Time seems to have moved very slowly in the old French colonies. In the streets of Martinique or Réunion or Marie-Galante or Guadeloupe, one almost seems to live in the seventeenth century,--so little have architecture or customs been modified in two or three hundred years. The great changes effected by the abolition of slavery are not immediately discernible to a stranger; the free blacks and people of color, forming the mass of the population, still cling to the simple and bright attire of other days, and seem to hold almost the same relation to white colonial life as hired servants that they formerly held as slaves. Emancipation, republicanism, and education have not yet abolished the old manners, nor greatly modified the creole speech. Could Josephine arise from the dust of her rest to revisit her Martinique birthplace, she would find so little changed at Trois-Islets, that except for the saucier manner of the younger negroes, she could scarcely surmise the new republican conditions. And the modern life of the creole woman, though less luxurious than in the previous century of colonial prosperity, varies otherwise little from that of her great-greatgrandmother.