hangman attending to him on one side, and
the clergyman in his surplice attending to
him on the other?

A LAKE OF PITCH.

THE great sight of the West Indies, is the
Pitch Lake of Trinidad. I therefore, a British
traveller, put myself on board the William
Burnley, perhaps the smallest steamboat that
ever crossed the Atlantic. This adventurous
vessel now plies a lucrative trade in the Gulf
of Paria, between the port of Spain and the
other towns and settlements on the West
Coast of Trinidad. And it had the goodness
to put me down at La Brea, where passengers
for the Pitch Lake are landed.

The reef that formerly enclosed the little
harbour has been all exported, for pitch, by an
enterprising foreigner; but the boat grounds on
pitch—you step ashore on a pitch wharf—pitch
is stored on it—you see pitch everywhere— the
air is full of pitch—the conversation is all on
the price of pitch. A more dreary looking
place I have never seen, and as a residence
it is even worse than it looks. The few Europeans
who live here, or who visit the place
frequently, suffer acutely from fever and ague,
and the remainder of the population, the
modern Piceni—although they seem to have
wonderfully adapted their colour, like trout in a
stream—to the locality in which they live yet
are unable to acclimatise themselves to the fatal
atmosphere.

Declining the honour of a seat in a country
cart drawn by bullocks, which was going up
to the Lake, we started on foot, as we had not
to walk more than a mile from the shore. The
first part of the road had unfortunately just
been "improved" by the Warden; that is, a
ditch had been dug on either side— a desirable
thing in itself— and the mud, lumps of pitch
and turf, had all been thrown into the middle of
the road. Luckily, the Warden's energy or his
money had not enabled him to carry his
improvements far, and we soon came to the
track in its original state: a very fair road
of natural asphalte, pleasant to walk on, hard
and springy. Leaving behind us the few
scattered hovels that constitute the village
(wretched in themselves, but surrounded by
beautiful flowers and splendid pine-apples, for
which La Brea is famous), we came out on a
most desolate tract, whence the wood had been
cleared for timber or by fire, and where many
experiments in pitch digging had been made.
One's impression naturally is, that where pitch
enters so very largely into the composition of
the soil, an accidental fire in the woods would
soon become inextinguishable and convert the
whole district into " Phlegræan Plains," but
fortunately the pitch on the surface does not
burn.

As the road gradually ascended, it was
curious to see how the overlapping layers of
pitch assumed a curve, bulging down hill,
reminding one somewhat of lava currents, or of
Professor Forbes's ingenious experiment for
illustrating his theory of the semi-viscous
nature of glaciers. Half a mile more brought us
to the lake itself. At the first view the whole
lie of it is exactly like that of any other small
lake in a forest, and one does not notice that it
is filled with pitch instead of water. There
are the swampy-looking tufts of rushes and
rough grass on the margin, the forest ends in a
clearly marked line all round, and several
islands covered with trees and bushes are dotted
over the surface of the lake. The momentary
illusion is quickly dispelled by the colour
and solid appearance of the flood. The pitch
is, throughout nearly the whole surface, hard
enough to walk over with perfect safety. It
has a peculiarly clean look, and my first
impression was that the top had just been
removed from the part we first walked over, and
that then it had been swept with a very hard
broom, or scraped when rather soft, there
being the same sort of marks on it that are left
by a birch broom on a very soft gravel path.
The whole lake is intersected by cracks, or
rather valleys, in which the exudations, apparently
from different centres, have not quite
met. These vary in depth and width, from a few
inches to many feet, and at the time of my
visit were full of water. In one of the larger
I saw a very ugly bull-headed fish, weighing-
ing about a quarter of a pound— I presume a
"warm-water fish;" but it is surprising that
any fish could exist in water so warm and so
impregnated with sulphur and other matters.
We began to cross these cracks on the back of
a very tall nigger, but as this involved some
delay as well as the risk of disappearing with
the nigger under the water, should he make a
false step, or slip at the critical moment, a
long plank was substituted, by the help of
which we reached the other side of the lake,
tolerably dry, and struck into the forest by a
sort of corduroy road. Here are what are
called "pitch volcanes"—small mounds not
more than two feet usually, above the level,
in the centre a hole about eight inches in
diameter. In some of the holes the pitch,
which seemed perfectly liquid, was some few feet
below the surface; in others it was near the
brim, and in others it was oozing over. I could
not ascertain that the volcanes ever showed
any greater activity. The first part of the
road lay through a grove of palm-trees of great
beauty and variety— chiefly the fan-palm and
Maximiliana insignia— these were succeeded by
a dense forest of fine trees. A sharp turn in
the path unexpectedly showed that we were
again close to the sea, though some fifty feet
above the shore, and disclosed one of the most
charming views, on a small scale, that I ever
saw: the rippling sea dotted with small rocky
islets, each capped with foliage; steep red
cliffs to the left, overhung with creepers; all
around us the tropical forest with its
wonderful forms, its marvellous flowers, its
profusion of ferns, and the splendid butterflies