NASSAU HOSPITALITY. 297 



The pleasant and agreeable attentions which are shown by the 

 local clergy of Nassau and some prominent church members to 

 ecclesiastics from abroad, who, by letter or otherwise, make them- 

 selves known, may be inferred from the following extract from 

 a short descriptive and highly eulogistic account of Nassau, com- 

 municated to a Xew York religious paper by a clergyman. He 

 writes under the date of March 25, 187G: ''The hospitality of 

 the inhabitants is as warm and genial as their clime. The jiolite 

 cordiality extended to non-residents makes them forget they are 

 strangers in a strange land." A burrowing animal from its little 

 hole in the ground is about as well qualified to describe a universe 

 which it has not seen, as is a Doctor of Divinity to accurately 

 portray the hospitality of a place, because the doors of certain 

 good, pious and appreciative persons have always been flung wide 

 open at the approach of one of God's faA'ored ambassadors. We 

 doubt if the learned doctor was invited to the high-toned enter- 

 tainments, where cards and wine and the waltz shortened the 

 hours of midnight and of the early morning, and helped to place 

 in full accord the best blood of the Bahamas with the aristocratic 

 and royal blood of the mother country. And we know from ob- 

 servation and experience, wiiat any one may know is true from 

 the nature of the case, that forty-nine out of fifty strangers so- 

 journing in Nassau will never know, except from report, that 

 there is such a thing as a generous hospitality anywhere upon 

 the island. This is not exceptional, for the same thing is and 

 must be true in all places where strangers arrive regularly at short 

 intervals and in large numbers. In a small, poor city, they con- 

 stitute rich golden placers to be sedulously worked, and not dis- 

 guised angels to be entertained. 



"We all know by report, and not a few by personal experience, 

 the warmth and glow of a hospitality, noble and unselfish, that 

 was indigenous to the soil, and flourished with tropical luxuriance 



