If beauty of form and strange weird colouring are the first things which strike the new-comer to St. Vincent, the next, it must be admitted, is the marvellous bleakness of the place. Hillsides and mountains stand out bare and rugged, without showing, on a cursory inspection at any rate, the least sign of vegetation. One of the characteristics also of the place is the constant tearing wind. During the whole of our visit of some ten days we were never able to find a day when it was calm enough for Mrs. Taylor, the wife of the British Consul, to face the short passage from the harbour and visit _Mana_. This wind is purely local and a short distance off dies away. How, one is inclined to ask, can it be possible for English men and women to endure life in a tropical glare, with a perpetual wind without any trees, any grass, any green on which to rest the eye? And yet we found over and over again that, though the comer from greener worlds is at first unhappy and restless in St. Vincent, those who had been there some time found life pleasant and enjoyable and had no desire to exchange it. There are several coaling and other English firms, and local society rejoices in as many as thirty English ladies. The cable company has over a hundred employees, of whom the greater number are English. The unmarried members of the staff live together in the station, each having a bed-sitting-room and dining in a common hall. There is an English chaplain, and also a Baptist minister, who is the proprietor of the principal shop. The chaplain had the experience, which everyone must have felt would happen some time to someone, of being carried off involuntarily on an ocean-going steamer. He was saying good-bye to friends, missed the warning bell, and before he knew was _en route_ for a port in South America, to which he had duly to proceed. For recreation St. Vincent possesses a tennis-court and cricket-field: the last is in a particularly arid spot some distance from the town, which is however already planned out on paper by the authorities with streets and houses for prospective needs; in the design the pitch is left vacant and named in Portuguese “Game of Cricket,” the remainder of the field being filled in anticipation with a grove of trees.