Our

feet high, and call at Castries (cäs-trē'), the capital. steamer goes right up to the wharves, and we watch the ships taking on coal while we wait. The island is volcanic and wild in the extreme. Castries is an excellent coaling station, but otherwise of little importance.

Our next stop is at Martinique, where we land at Fort de France and climb Mont Pelée, the terrible volcano which ruined the town of St. Pierre and a great part of the island a few years ago. The volcano is less than a mile high, but it periodically bursts forth into awful eruptions, which deluge farms and villages, destroying multitudes of people.

Martinique has many fertile valleys, and its appearance is somewhat like that of Tutuila in Samoa. It belongs to France and is governed by that country, although its people are chiefly mulattoes. They look much like the natives of Barbados, save that the women wear dresses of brighter colors and have great hoops in their ears. The products are sugar and cacao, and the fruits of the tropics.

From Martinique we go north to the British island of Dominica, so named because Columbus discovered it on Sunday. It is volcanic and is chiefly noted for its sugar. Farther north still is Guadeloupe (ga-de-loop'), an island shaped like an hour glass, belonging to France, and above it the British islands of Montserrat, Antigua, Nevis, and St. Christopher, all small and of little importance. Nevis, Alexander Hamilton was born. named by Columbus after his patron often called St. Kitts, Kitt being the nickname for Christopher. During our stay there we climb Mount Misery,

On

St. Christopher was

saint, but it is more

a half-dead volcano, and afterward visit Brimstone Hill, close to the shore, which looks as though it had been thrown out of the crater.

After leaving St. Kitts we sail in and out among the Danish possessions of St. John, St. Croix (croi'), and St. Thomas, which may sometime belong to the United States, Congress having offered to buy them. They are little volcanic islands discovered by Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. They are southeast of Porto Rico. and in the track of vessels running between Europe and Panama and South America. They have all together a population of thirty-two thousand, mostly colored. Their climate is delightful, and as they lie in the track of the trade winds it is never too hot.

Our steamer calls at St. Thomas to coal. The chief value of the island comes from the harbor, which is wide and deep and makes this place an excellent coaling and naval station. The coal is carried to the ships by negro girls, in huge baskets on pads on top of their heads. They are barefooted and barearmed, and they sing as they trot up the gang plank with their baskets of coal.

While waiting we throw coins to the diving boys in the harbor, and then land for a stroll about Charlotte Amalie, as the town is named. It is a pretty place, with narrow, clean streets and well-stocked stores. As we come back to the ship, women peddlers gather about us and offer us fruit and other things for sale. We spend a few cents for some oranges and a couple of pineapples, quenching our thirst with cocoanut water fresh from the shell.

A little later the steamer toots out its warning to leave, and we hurry on board. Our ship sails to the westward.

We pass the little islands of Vieques (vē-ā'kās) and Culebra (koo-la'bra), belonging to the United States, and in the course of a few hours find ourselves in front of San Juan, the capital of Porto Rico, and under the shadow of the dear old American flag.

B'

53. GENERAL VIEW OF PORTO RICOA WALK THROUGH SAN JUAN

EFORE we land on Porto Rico, suppose we take a bird's-eye view of the island. Let us imagine ourselves in a balloon high above it. It lies on the sea, an almost rectangular mass of rolling blue hills, with clouds resting on them, and a light green fringe of lowlands bordering the coast. The land rises in the center, a

mountain ridge running through it from west to east, branching out into two spurs not far from the middle, so that the ridge has the shape of a pitchfork with a short handle and two long tines. There, near where the tines come together, is El Yunque or The Anvil. That mountain is thirty-six hundred feet above the sea, and it is the highest point in Porto Rico.

How rugged the hills are! They slope up in places like walls, making valleys shaped like capital V's, with mountain streams running through them. Descending, we observe that everything is covered with green; the dark shades on the mountains are fields of coffee, tobacco, and bananas, and the pale green of the low coastal plains is the sugar plantations.

Porto Rico looks large to us from our balloon. It is not so in comparison with many of our states. You could put ten such islands into Indiana, and it would take two of them to cover New Jersey. Its average width is only a little greater than the distance from Washington to Baltimore, and its length not much more than from Baltimore to Philadelphia. If Porto Rico were level, we could walk from one end of it to the other in three days, and we could cross it in one.

huts shine out

How thickly the island is settled! We can see houses everywhere through our field glasses. There are villages along the coast and in the valleys, and of the trees on the tops of the mountains. There are but few large cities, the most prominent being San Juan on the north coast and Ponce on the south, neither of which has more than fifty thousand inhabitants. Smaller places are Arecibo, Aguadilla, and Mayaguez (mä-yȧ-gwās') there