44. ISLES OF SUMMER. 
it to become for these islands the seat and focus of civil, political, 
ecclesiastical, and military power. Without its geographical and 
topographical advantages, it is not probable that within its nar- 
row borders a Colonial Governor would ever have had his resi- 
dence, an Episcopal Bishop his seat, or two companies of her 
majesty’s colored troops their barracks. No old and rusty guns 
would have given to the erests ot its hills a military and warlike 
aspect; jurisprudence would have soug1t elsewhere room for her 
highest courts,.and no colonial representatives or lords would 
have occupied imported high-backed chairs in its legislative 
halls. 
New Providence has an extreme length of about nineteen and 
three-eights miles from east to west; an extreme width of about 
seven miles from north to south; an average width of about five 
miles; and embraces a total area of about eighty-five square 
miles. From the north shore in front of Nassau, the distance 
across the island is between five and six miles. With the excep- 
tion of a very few square miles occupied by Nassau and its sub- 
urbs, there is little upon the island except water and wilderness; 
the former brackish, and throbbing and in some places appear- 
ing and disappearing with the long pulsations of the sea’s diurnal 
tides, and the latter, to a large extent, a dense low jungle, with 
stretchés of pitch pine forests rising from a thick undergrowth 
of scrub palmettoes, all being root-fastened to the rocks and ap- 
parently living like Dr. Tanner during his recent forty days’ fast, 
exclusively upon air and water. 
The western extremity of New Providence is called Clifton 
Point, and its eastern extremity, East Point. In a south-west- 
erly direction from Nassau, at a distance of probably seven or 
eight miles, Lake Killarney is situated—a body of shallow, brack- 
ish water nearly three miles in length from east to west, and 
about two and three-fifth miles in width from north to south. 
