Alexander Winter. In Memoriam. 123 
estates now out of cultivation. He was for many years 
Financial Representative of Berbice in the Combined 
Court. He held a commission as colonel of militia; and 
he was for a time A.D.C. to Governor Sir Henry 
Barklay. A full enough career this surely — and one 
exhibiting a curious and no longer possible combination 
of duties. If I may judge from my own acquaintance 
with him, which existed only during the last few years 
of his life, a more contemplative and literary career would 
have suited him better. He finally became Administrator 
General for Berbice, and occupied during his later years, 
with which we are here chiefly concerned, a position 
which enabled him to devote some of his leisure to the 
books and the studies in which he chiefly delighted. 
Living during these later years in New Amsterdam, 
he was enabled to keep close watch over all that went 
on along the shores of his favourite river, the Berbice, 
where his family's property had once been situated and 
where he had gained his earliest, and always kindly 
remembered, impressions of colonial life, — of colonial life 
at a time when this was very different from what it now 
is. In his retentive memory were stored — were stored 
so nicely that we may say, were pigeon-holed — all the 
details of life as it was spent in Berbice in the old days 
when the flower-burdened, sweet-scented coffee-tree 
was more prominent than the more prosaic, if more re- 
munerative, sugar-cane ; when people who had been 
children in those same places, and whose fathers had been 
children in those same places, still occupied many thriving 
homes along the Berbice River, where there was still 
there a quaint Dutch-English-Dutch society of some 
culture. All the details of this now long ended time he 
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