If that voyage had been almost enough to extinguish all the ardour I had for the life before me, Nassau was enough to set it well aflame again. The very thought of the place and of the exciting life there in those days, through the brief fever of its prosperity, sets my fancy tingling even now. Those few short years of extravagant importance—so sudden, so fitful, so completely passed away—are like a dream, and it seems almost impossible to revive a picture of what Nassau was when it found itself the base of operations against the great blockade. For centuries the little town had slumbered in complete obscurity. Depopulated and abandoned in the old days by the Spaniards, it had been occupied in Stuart times by Englishmen, and became a haunt of buccaneers. Then followed a century or so when it was a counter for diplomatists, and buccaneers settled down into wreckers, scraping together hard-earned living from the hurricanes' leavings, and filling up the dull months between the stormy seasons with a little fruit raising and sponge fishing. Thus ingloriously had it faded into the obscurest of colonial capitals, with a population of some 3000 or 4000 souls. There lived and ruled the Governor of the Bahamas, and there lived the Chief Justice and the Bishop; these with their modest following, and the officers of a West India regiment and a few of the leading merchants and their families, made up almost all there was of society! Little more eventful ever broke the monotony of their feuds and friendships than the visit of one of the ships forming the West Indian squadron. Their Lilliputian politics went on from year to year, undisturbed and uncared for; there was nothing to mark their place in the world but a dusty pigeon-hole somewhere in the Colonial Office, which was filled, and emptied, and filled again. Every one was poor and every one lazily hopeless of any further development; a few schooners that came and went at infrequent intervals sufficed for all the trade there was, and the whole air of the sleepy settlement had been one of indolent acquiescence in its own obscurity.