From Bermuda I took a sailing vessel¹ to New York, in company with a rather large assortment² of potatoes and onions. I had declared during my unlucky voyage from Kingston to Cuba that no consideration should again tempt³ me to try a sailing vessel, but such declarations always go for nothing. A man in his misery⁴ thinks much of his misery; but as soon as he is out of it it is forgotten, or becomes matter for mirth. Of even a voyage in a sailing vessel one may say that at some future time it will perhaps be pleasant to remember that also. And so I embarked⁵ myself along with the potatoes and onions on board the good ship 'Henrietta.'

Indeed, there is no other way of getting from Bermuda to New York; or of going anywhere from Bermuda—except to Halifax and St. Thomas, to which places a steamer runs once a month. In going to Cuba I had been becalmed, starved, shipwrecked, and very nearly quaranteened. In going to New York I encountered only the last misery. The doctor who boarded us stated that a vessel had come from Bermuda with a sick man, and that we must remain where we were till he had learnt what was the sick man's ailment⁶. Our skipper, who knew the vessel in question, said that one of their crew had been drunk in Bermuda for two or three days, and had not yet worked it off. But the doctor called again in the course of the day, and informed us that it was intermittent⁷ fever. So we were allowed to pass. It does seem strange that sailing vessels⁸ should be subjected to such annoyances⁹. I hardly think that one of the mail steamers going into New York would be delayed because there was a case of intermittent fever on board another vessel from Liverpool.

It is not my purpose to give an Englishman's ideas of the United States, or even of New York, at the fag end of a volume treating about the West Indies. On the United States I should like to write a volume, seeing that the government and social life of the people there—of that people who are our children—afford the most interesting

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