than if you were utterly alone! You "Well, no particular impression. He couldn't stand it! I know you could not! is just the same crotchetty, touchy, worthy You would murder the assistant, and throw soul he ever was! The last man in the yourself into the sea, or be driven to per- world to tamper with any document. I form some sort of tragedy before three know what you are thinking of; but he months were over, believe me!" would not have the pluck-believe me, he would not."

"It seems a far-fetched idea," interrupted Mrs. Temple, "and yet I cannot get rid of it. You know the day he brought me that false will- - as I shall always consider it; he offered to cancel or "First, I want a vivâ voce description destroy it - I forget exactly what he said of your interview with Mr. Ford. Your-but something to that effect. I scarcely letter was a little hurried, though it was noticed at the time, but I have often very good of you to write at all in such a thought of it since." whirl."

me to consent; and then what a hold he | she asked. Tom gave it, for as it was would have had upon me!" identical with the first appearance of his play, he knew it well. A few more questions proved she was putting down the substance of Reed's communication.

"By George! I could never believe that proper old boy would be such a villain! I think, my fair friend, you romance a little all the better for a literary future."

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May I ask what that is for?" said he. "This is my evidence-book," replied Kate, turning over the pages. "I put down here everything, great and small, that strikes me as bearing in any possible way upon my case."

"I protest you are a first-rate solicitor spoiled by your sex! What suggested such a business-like proceeding, positively unnatural in a woman?”

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"Do not laugh at me, Tom; and pray do not lose sight of Ford. My whole soul is as fixed as ever on the hope of clearing myself and my husband's memory from the foul slander of that abominable will." "I will help you with all my wits!" cried Tom, remembering his creditable acquaintance Trapes and his inquiries. "But I dare not encourage you to hope. You say this Galbraith is going to leave: I would advise you when he is just off to make yourself known, and then I'll take long odds that he will make better offers of a settlement, and you might arrange things comfortably. It need not interfere with another will, should it turn up." "Never offer me such advice again!"ity be useful." cried Mrs. Temple, indignantly. "It is a positive insult.”

"I am dumb then," said Tom, submissively. After a few moments' thought, he asked, "Do you think Ford ever dabbled in any betting or turfy transactions?"

do

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I should say not certainly not. Why you ask?"

"Because a very queer character was making inquiries about him the other day." And Tom proceeded to describe his conversation with Trapes.

"I cannot tell; dwelling intensely on a topic is something like boring for a well, I imagine. If you only go on long enough and deep enough, you are sure to strike an idea-or a spring! Then you know poor Mr. Travers was always making notes of ideas and suggestions, and all sorts of things that might by any possibil

"Believe me, Mrs. Travers - well, Temple! I must try and remember it - you have admirable qualities for a writer. The keeper of a diary, if intelligent, is the possessor of a mine."

"I trust this will prove one to me; but -oh! here is Fanny," as that young person entered, prayer-book in hand, and announced triumphantly that she had been escorted back from church by Mr. Turner, junior.

"Have you finished your consultation "It is curious," said Kate, reflectively, yet?" she continued, "or shall I go out after listening with deep attention to his again? I dare say Mr. Turner is lingeraccount; "but I cannot see that this sup-ing outside, and will not mind keeping me posed debt of Ford's can affect me in any company a little while.” way, even if true; and I presume your friend has some powers of invention, as you say he was once on the press."

"No doubt. I believe very little he says; but that he wanted to find Ford or the man he resembled - is a fact, whatever the reason; and, moreover, he knows something of Mr. Travers's people."

"True," returned Kate; and then fell into a fit of thought, from which she roused herself by a sort of effort to ask, "Where is this man Trapes to be found?" "Oh! I have not an idea; indeed, I had no inclination to keep up the connection." "I wish we knew.'

"Better have nothing to say to him; he would only persuade you to throw away your money."

From The Fortnightly Review. DUTCH GUIANA.

CHAPTER I.

THE COAST.

"When creeping carefully along the beach
The mouth of a green river did they reach,
Cleaving the sands, and on the yellow bar
The salt waves and the fresh waves were at war."
MORRIS.

"TIS known, at least it should be," that Surinam, geographically indicated by the easterly slice of Guiana placed between our own South-American possessions on the one side and French Cayenne on the Mrs. Temple made no reply; but again other, is up to the present day under Dutch opening her desk, took out a memoran- rule; while Demerara, or, to speak more dum-book, in which she began to write. correctly, the broad British territory that "What was the date of your interview?" | includes in one the three provinces of Ber

off the lower town-wharf, waiting to take me for a cruise of a hundred and fifty miles; such being the distance interposed between the harbour of Berbice and the mouth of the Surinam River, where rises the capital of Dutch Guiana.

bice, Demerara, and Essequibo, was, till a | arranged for my further progress, by putcomparatively recent period, Dutch also. ting at my disposal the trim little revenue Now I had often heard it affirmed that schooner" Gazelle," that now lay at anchor the immense superstructure of prosperity raised by British energy on the shores of Demerara owed its oft-tried solidity, if not in whole, at least in no inconsiderable part, to the well-devised foundation work bequeathed us as a parting legacy by our Batavian predecessors. Our form of administration is Dutch, so said my informants, our local institutions Dutch, our seawalls are Dutch, our canals, our sluices, the entire system of irrigation and drainage from which the land derives its unparalleled fertility and we our wealth, all are Dutch; we have made English use of these things, no doubt, and the merit of that use is ours; but the merit of the things themselves is not all our own, it belongs rather to those who first created them and gave them to the land.

A sailing-craft, however small, if in good trim, clean, possessed of a comfortable cabin, and under a steady beam-wind, all which advantages were combined in the present instance, is a welcome change from the inevitable smoke, crowding, noise, oily smell, and ceaseless roll of the largest and finest steamer ever propelled by engine. In the present instance, the crew of the "Gazelle" was to a man composed of creole, that is, colonial-born, negroes; indeed the pilot's memory reached back to the time when the terms negro and slave were identical in his own person, as in the majority of his Guiana brethren. Civil, cheerful, and obliging, as the descendants of Ham, despite of their ill-conditioned father's bad example, usually are, they were also, what for a voyage like this amid sand-banks and shoals was of more importance, good seamen, and the captain in charge a good navigator, though a black one.

How far might this be true? Colonial success amid the many failures recorded and yet recording in these very regions must be, every one will admit, a phenomenon, the sources of which would be well worth discovery; and here before me was an instance ready to hand, and a cause assigned. Why not investigate its correctness? There was time at disposal, and from Georgetown to Paramaribo is no great distance. Besides, I had already "I would rather by any amount have a received assurance of a hearty welcome black crew than a white one under my from his Excellency Van Sypesteyn, the orders," is a remark which I have heard representative of Dutch majesty in Suri- made by many and many a West-Indian nam; and an invitation of the sort, when sea-captain, lamenting over the insubordicombined with that chiefest of all factors nation, drunkenness, and other offences of in life's calculations, neighbourhood, made his men. And in fact negroes, like their the present occasion doubly favourable. half-cousins the Arabs, have naturally in So I readily determined to follow up my themselves the making of excellent seaDemeraran visit by another to a region men, active, handy, and daring, besides which, while in natural respects hardly being far more amenable to the restraints differing for good or evil from British of discipline, and less so to the seductions Guiana, had all along remained under Ba- of the brandy or rum bottle, than the avertavian mastership; and where conse-age material of which white crews are quently the original institutions of our own acquired colony might be conveniently studied unmodified, or nearly so, by foreign influences and change of rule.

nowadays formed. And should our own strangely scattered and disunited West-Indian possessions ever realize among themselves the ideal "cluster of small states," the not unreasonable hope of other statesmen besides the romantic descendant of the Contarinis, such a confed

indispensable navy than her less necessary standing army from among the black creoles of her own islands and coasts.

From Georgetown eastward, an excellent carriage-road runs parallel to the coast, though at some distance from it inland; the drive is a pleasant one, travers-eracy might even more easily recruit her ing a varied succession of large estates and populous villages, interrupted here and there by patches of marsh and wood, till the journey ends on the western bank of a full-flowing river, the Berbice; beyond which lies the small town of the same name, not far from the Anglo-Batavian frontier. Here official kindness had

A brisk wind was blowing, and the white cloud-drift scudding before the Atlantic trade-wind over the pale blue vault had in it something more akin to a Mediterranean than to a tropical sky, as we

these wide gaps in the forest margin, and the corresponding breaker patches out at sea, occurs to vary the monotony of yellow waves and level forest-line, that by its utter sameness wearies the eye and depresses the spirits of the voyager.

weighed anchor, and taking advantage of the seaward ebb, cleared out of the narrow channel alongside of the low bushgrown shoal that lies athwart the Berbice mouth, and bears, in common with countless other small islets and rocks of these latitudes, the name of Crab Island. The "What a contrast," may that same crab here in question is not the dainty voyager not improbably say to himself, crustacean of our seas, but the hideous "is the Dutch shore to the coast of Britland-crab, known to the students of Rod-ish Guiana!" There the view by sea or erick Random and Tom Cringle; a monster that may be eaten by such, and such only, as are stomach-proof against the unpleasant associations of burial-grounds and carrion. Soon the tall, formal, semiBatavian houses of Berbice, and its yet taller market-tower, or look-out,- for every town hereabouts has within its circle one of these at least, to serve for a beacon to the seafarer, and a watch-place whence notice can be given in case of fire or any other sudden danger threatening the townsmen themselves,- had disappeared from our view behind river-bend and forest; and by noon we were afloat on the open sea.

.

land is not particularly picturesque, to be sure; but, to make up for the want of beauty, we have the prospect scarce less pleasurable to the mind, if not to the eye, of a close succession of tall chimneys, each with its flaunting smoke-pennon, along the whole length of the southern horizon from Berbice to the Pomeroon, or near it, proclaiming an almost continuous cultivation, and the triumphs of the industry that has transformed a "lonely mudbank, once productive of nothing but alliators, snakes, and mosquitoes, into a thriving, populous, wealth-coining colony. Here, on the contrary, not a chimney, not a construction of any sort, overtops the impenetrable mangrove growth of the shore; scarcely, and at distant intervals, does an irregular wreath of blue vapour, curling above the forest, tell its tale of clearing and habitation. Whence the traveller may, if so minded, deduce the further conclusion of the inferiority of the Batavian race to the British, of Dutch colonization to English, etc., etc., etc., Q. E. D.

The open, but "not the blue;" much less the typical "black water" of the deep Atlantic. From the Orinoco to the Amazon the aqueous fringe of the SouthAmerican coast is a shallow, muddy, brackish, ochrey sort of composition, which overspreads an almost imperceptible downward slope of alluvial deposit, that reaches out seaward for ten, fifteen, twenty, or even more miles, and bears witness to the prodigious volumes of But this conclusion, like many others water poured unceasingly, with little dif- drawn at first sight, would break down on ference of month or season, by the count- closer inspection of the premises; and, less rivers of the great southern conti- first of all, because the two coasts, hownent into the ocean beyond. As we slow-ever much like each other when seen from ly make our way up along the coast, tack- five or six miles' distance out to sea, are ing and re-tacking against the unvarying in reality very unlike; so much so indeed trade-breeze, broad gaps in the monoto- that neither for praise nor blame can any nous line of low brown forest, the shore correct comparison be made between horizon on our left, successively indicated them. For throughout the whole, or the mouth of one or other of these great very nearly the whole, breadth of British streams, many among which, nor those Guiana, a wide swamp district, lower itby any means the largest, equal or exceed self than the average sea-level, and in the Severn and the Garonne in length of consequence very difficult if not impossicourse and copiousness of flow. Of the ble to drain, cuts off the available landlatter in particular a further intimation strip of the coast itself from the firm but was given by the tossing of our ship distant high lands of the interior, and by where the strong river current, felt far so doing confines the choicest sugar-proout at sea, crossed and thwarted the reg-ducing tracts of the colony to the immeular succession of waves as they rolled slowly on from the open Atlantic, and roughened them into whitening breakers.

From the outlet of the Corentyn, that acts as boundary between British and Dutch Guiana, to the mouth of the Surinam River itself, hardly anything beside

diate vicinity of the shore, where they are all arranged side by side in a long but narrow strip, hemmed in between the ocean to the north and the almost equally unmanageable morass on the south. In Dutch Guiana, on the contrary, a rise, slight but sufficient, of the continental

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level, has thrust forward the swamp region | opinion among the long-shore men themfrom the interior down to the very shore, selves, some secular deflection of winds where it forms a barrier behind which the sugar lands and estates ensconce themselves with no particular_background, untill perhaps the worthy Brazilians condescend to define their frontier, which as yet they seem in no hurry to do, and thus remain for the most part out of sight of the seafarer, though not out of easy reach

of river communication.

and currents yearly brings a heavier volume of water to war against the unprotected low-lying land, I know not; but this much is certain, that the sea encroaches more and more, and that every equinoctial spring-tide, in particular, is signalled by a wider and more perilous invasion of the watery enemy, and bears his usurpations ever farther over forest and plain.

This invisibility from the sea and those who go down to their business in the great Whatever the cause, aqueous or terrene, waters was by no means an adverse cir- its effects are only too certain; and a cumstance; on the contrary, it was a very woeful example was soon before our eyes, desirable one to the old Dutch settlers when, after not many hours' cruise, we throughout the seventeenth and even dur- anchored off the little town, or, to speak ing the eighteenth century. For those more truly, remnant of a town, called were days when many a gallant Captain Nikerie. The name is, I believe, like Morgan, Captain French, or Captain Cut- most of the names hereabouts, Indian, the throat whatever, would hail his men on the meaning of course unknown. The dislook-out, as their piratical bark hugged trict, which is also denominated Nikerie, the coast on her way to the golden plunder lies immediately to the east of the Coof the Spanish Main, ready enough to rentyn River, and is thus the nearest of shorten sail and let down the boats, had all to the British territory. It contains at any tempting indication of hoarded Bata- the present day, as official returns tell us, vian wealth, whether in produce or in nine estates, comprising between them coin, appeared within the limits of a long- 2,832 acres of cultivated soil. The numshore raid. But the case was different sober was formerly greater, but no portion long as the dense bush-barrier defended of the colony suffered so much from the what it concealed; and the river estuaries, however frequent and wide, afforded no better prospect to the would-be plunderers than that of a difficult and perhaps distant navigation up stream, far from their comrades in the ships at sea, with the additional probabilities of meeting with a fort or two on the way to bar their passage. And thus, throughout the worst days of piratic menace, the hoards of Dutch Guiana remained, with one exception to be mentioned hereafter, unpillaged, chiefly because unseen; while the more patent treasures of the Frenchman and the Spaniard were harried to enrich the offers, or decorate the Pollys and Betsys, of these lawless heroes of the Caribbean deeps.

The age of pirates and buccaneers is past, and even from regular naval invasion a West-Indian colony, under the present circumstances of warfare, has little to fear. But independently of the mischiefmakers, whom of old times it brought on its waves, the sea of this coast is itself a troublesome and occasionally a dangerous neighbour to the planter and his labours. Whether it is that the north-eastern side of this great continent is in very truth slowly sinking, as runs the ominous verdict of not a few grave scientific judges; or whether, as I found to be the prevalent

emancipation crisis, and the other causes of discouragement and depression, from which wealthier and more favoured colonies are only now beginning to recover, and that slowly.

The estates, mostly cane or cocoa, are all situated at some distance inland up the river, safely sheltered behind the tangled mangrove fringe. Where goods have to be shipped, remoteness from the seacoast is of course an inconvenience; yet with this the colonists long preferred to put up rather than deviate from their traditionary rule. But when, at the opening of the present century, the British lion, jealous lest so choice a morsel as Dutch Guiana should fall into the jaws of the ravenous French republic and still more ravenous empire, temporarily extended a protective paw over these regions, a new order of things prevailed for a time, and an unwonted self-confidence took in more than one instance the place of prudential caution. Under these novel auspices the seemingly eligible site of the Nikerie River mouth was not likely to be passed over, and soon a flourishing little town, with streets, shops, stores, churches, public buildings, and the rest, arose and dilated itself on the western point, to the great advantage of commerce, and for awhile bravely held its own.