The Hurricane in St. Vincent. 65 
peatedly in their descent were they obliged to cower 
beneath the shrubs from the fury of the blast. They lost 
14 negroes, several of whom were killed by the falling of 
a flight of stone steps, under which they had taken 
shelter as a place of the greatest safety, and many 
others were seriously injured. Only one negro house 
was left standing and Mrs. S. was forced to seek shelter 
in the dungeon of the estate. I visited this scene of 
desolation soon after, and the miserable sight which the 
ruins of the house presented was really melancholy. The 
materials were scattered around in every direction far 
and nearj just as if meal bad been thrown into a basin 
and quickly turned round by the hand. Here was the 
arm of a chair, the leg of a table, an organ pipe, broken 
crockery, window frames, in short no two things to- 
gether alike ; and yet strange to say, though the house 
was one mass of ruins, and the very room in which the 
portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland were hung was 
an upper room, and both it and the room beneath fell in, 
yet the pictures were dug out without having sustained 
the least injury, the burnished and gilded frames as 
bright as ever, and the oil painting not even scratched. 
This gave rise to many curious surmises among the 
negroes who think they must have been witched away. 
One of the fields of canes which I passed on this estate, 
and which had been 3 or 4 feet high, was so destroyed 
that not a vestige of a cane was to be seen, and it bore 
the appearance of a fallow field in England, recently 
ploughed and harrowed. On the opposite side of the 
road, where the canes had been 5 or 6 feet high, a few 
small stumps discovered themselves, so as to precisely 
resemble a shaving brush. 
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