EXTRACTS FROM A LANDSMAN'S LOG. 

 III.— A SCENE IN BRIDGETOWN. 



What delightful picture is that presented from the 

 viranda in front of Betsey Austin's hotel during the 

 morning twilight ; the shipping in Carlisle Bay, each 

 in her own berth, with the faithful chain idly pendant 

 from her bows, are lazily rolled about over the swell, 

 and lie scattered like the drawing room chairs after 

 a lady's soiree. Here little skiffs shoot quickly by, 

 with women of color coming from Speight's town to 

 the market : there some merchant might be going 

 afloat to inspect his shipments. Then you heard 

 the yaws of a foreign vessel's crew as warping her 

 into the carenage ; and now again a chorus of black 

 fellows in their owner's row-barge — the oars dropping 

 large spangles of silver as she passed. Presently 

 these sounds would be lost in the fresh silence of 

 morning until up rose the glorious sun to wake all 

 things into life, and light, and motion. 



A singular character would sometimes place him- 

 self under this viranda — a poor half-caste whose 

 brain had been turned by that sort of melancholy, 

 which creeps up to it from the heart. He was, in 

 his way, a peripatetic intelligencer to the canaille of 

 Bridgetown, taking his station generally either on 

 the wharf, or by Nelson's statue in the square before 

 the Commisseriat-office. Here with audible voice, 

 and gesticulations that would heighten the effect of 

 his harangue, for though apparently reading from a 

 tattered book he would hold, the incoherence soon 

 betrayed him, poor Sir Sidney Smith would deliver 

 a philippic against the colony at large, and the 

 women-kind therein in particular. It ordinarily 

 concluded with a complaint of certain pay and rations 

 being unjustly withheld from him by the aforesaid 

 Commisseriat, about which he would threaten to 

 write his father. This was, in his crazed fancy, the 

 gallant admiral, whose name they had given him. 

 One morning he hit on a notable device to attract 



