the permission to settle there having been refused by one Don Juan Lonstrelet, at that time commandant of Port Royal, to a party of liberated slaves from the Grand Cayman Islands, Colonel Alexander Macdonald sent the British sloop Rover to re-establish authority in the place. The Cayman islanders who settled in the Bay Islands being British subjects, lived under the protection of the superintendents of Belize; but having in the course of a few years, by increase and emigration, got to number some thousand, they organised a kind of council, and elected its members among themselves. Disorganisation in their system having, however, been brought about by the interference of a Mr. Fitzgibbon, a native of the United States, the now prosperous islanders appealed to Colonel Fancourt, at that time superintendent of Belize, to establish a regular form of government in the island. "How far," says Mr. Squier, "this application was brought about by the English agents, it is not necessary to inquire; it was certainly a very adroit and plausible way of consummating the violence of Macdonald."

Be this as it may, certain it is that the inhabitants of the Bay Islands, who had at that time increased to some 1500 or 2000 in number, were in 1850 especially taken under Queen Victoria's protection. For a time they appointed their own magistrates, but this also not answering, the inhabitants drew up a petition, soliciting the appointment of a stipendiary magistrate; and at last Sir Charles Grey, colonial secretary, agreed to appoint such an officer, if the inhabitants would consent to pay a landtax of a shilling an acre to the British crown.

The Clayton and Bulwer Convention of the 19th of April, 1850, having determined that, for the future, neither the government of the United States nor of Great Britain shall occupy, fortify, or colonise, or assume or exercise any dominion over Nicaragua (where a party of filibusters are established at this very moment), Costa Rica, the Mosquito coast, or any part of Central America, or make use of any protection which either affords to any state or people, for the purpose of erecting or maintaining any such fortifications, it became necessary to confirm the past by establishing the same upon a legal and regular footing. The protectorate of the Mosquito territory having been virtually acknowledged by implication in the convention, it was scarcely necessary to show that her Majesty has never held possessions or fortifications in that country. Mr. James Buchanan, in his "Statement for the Earl of Clarendon," having, however, declared that the government of the United States, not satisfied with the terms of the convention, which concerns occupation, fortification, and colonisation, also contest and resist, and have always contested and resisted, the right of Great Britain to the protectorate, it became incumbent upon the British minister to show that this protectorate has existed for a great number of years, that its existence is not only implied by the convention, but that it is especially provided that such protectorate shall not be made the ground of occupation; and that further, supposing that that were not the case, the United States government could scarcely expect that Great Britain should enter into any explanation or defence of her conduct with respect to acts committed by her nearly forty years ago, in a matter in which no right or possession of the United States was involved. The government of the United States would, it is conceived,

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be much and justly surprised if the government of Great Britain were now to question the propriety of any of its long past acts, by which no territorial right of Great Britain had been affected; nor would the American people consider any justification or explanation of such acts to foreign states consistent with the dignity and independent position of the United States. The government of the United States, therefore, will not be surprised if the government of Great Britain abstains on this occasion from entering into anything which might appear an explanation or defence of its conduct with regard to its long-established protectorate of the Mosquitos.

In that which regards the question of British Honduras, the town of Belize, and the colony of the Bay Islands, Mr. Clayton, the co-contractor of the Clayton-Bulwer Convention, with Mr. Henry L. Bulwer, in his Memorandum of July 5, 1850, in reply to a declaration made by the latter to the effect that he had received her Majesty's instructions to declare that her Majesty does not understand the engagements of that convention to apply to her Majesty's settlement at Honduras, or to its dependencies, states distinctly, "I understood British Honduras was not embraced in the treaty of the 19th of April last." And in a further communication, dated July 4, 1850, Mr. Clayton states of the treaty, that "it was neither understood by them nor by either of us (the negotiators) to include the British settlement in Honduras nor the small islands in the neighbourhood of that settlement, which may be known as its dependencies. To this settlement and these islands the treaty we negotiated was not intended by either of us to apply."

Proceeding then upon the good faith of the convention thus concluded, Colonel P. E. Wodehouse, the superintendent of Belize (who qualified himself, Mr. Squier says, for his position as the accomplice of Torrington in Ceylon), called a general meeting of the inhabitants of the Bay Islands on the 10th day of August, and formally declared that her Majesty had been pleased to constitute and make the islands of Ruatan, Bonacca, Utilla, Barbaretta, Helena, and Morat, to be a colony, to be known and designated as the colony of the Bay Islands.

This act reveals to Mr. Squier's fiery vision "a system of aggression on the rights and sovereignty of Honduras unparalleled for its persistency, and terminating in a series of frauds which approach the sublime of effrontery. The brutal force of Macdonald was consummated by the frauds of Wodehouse; and these splendid islands are at this day held by Great Britain in disregard of treaty obligations, and on pretexts so bald and fallacious, that they serve only to render conspicuous the crimes which they were designed to conceal."

Mr. Buchanan, with more diplomatic courteousness, expresses his surprise, in the face of Mr. Clayton's explanatory letter and memorandum, that Great Britain has not retired from the island of Ruatan in obedience to the convention! And further, in allusion to the colony of the Bay Islands, he intimates that "public sentiment is quite unanimous in the United States that the establishment of this colony is a palpable violation of both the letter and the spirit of the Clayton and Bulwer Convention. To this Lord Clarendon replied by an appeal to Mr. Clayton's own memoranda, by pointing out that whenever Ruatan had been permanently

occupied, either in remote or in recent times, by anything more than a military guard or a flag-staff, the occupation had been by British subjects and as island dependencies of Belize, and that if the United States government did not consider them as such, it behoved her to have made such an exception. Mr. Buchanan retorted, that by the small islands in the neighbourhood of Belize was meant the Cayo Casina and other coral reefs immediately off that coast! The British government, perceiving at once that a discussion carried on upon such a system could come to no satisfactory conclusion, declined prosecuting such any further, and contented itself with a statement to the effect that, looking to the object which the contracting parties had in view at the conclusion of the convention-namely, the security of the proposed and now abandoned ship canal-the British government considers that the design of the contracting parties was not to disturb any state of things then existing, but to guard against the future creation of a state of things which might by possibility interfere with the security of the proposed canal. That such was the true design of the convention is obvious from the provision in the sixth article, by which the contracting parties engaged to invite every state to enter into stipulations with them similar to those contained in the convention. But if the position of the United States government were sound, and the convention was intended to interfere with the state of things existing at the time of its conclusion, and to impose upon Great Britain to withdraw from portions of territory occupied by it, a similar obligation would be contracted by other states acceding to the convention, and the government of the Central American States would, by the mere act of accession, sign away their rights to the territories in which they are situated!

Notwithstanding this conclusive way of putting the question, the American government persists in viewing the convention as having a retrospective operation, and, what is more invidious, a retrospective operation affecting Great Britain only. In the interest of the two countries, and the desire to maintain existing friendly relations, which ought alike to inspire each party with a conciliatory spirit, the British government, having neither the wish to extend the limits of its possessions or the sphere of its influence in that quarter, but not being prepared to make concessions in pursuance of the interpretation of a convention, to which interpretation it cannot subscribe, has offered to refer the matter to a third party, and the solution of the difficulty to an arbitrator. It is manifest that to decline such a mode of proceeding would be, on the part of the United States government, to acknowledge that it is in

error.

(BEING AN INTERCEPTED LETTER FROM KITTY CLOVER TO HER LOVING AND CONFIDENTIAL FRIEND SUSAN PERKINS.)

I PROMISED, you know, my dear Susan, to send you all particulars of the visit of our great man and naval hero to this the county of his birth and the town of his boyish reminiscences." I find, however, that the Darkshire Chronicle has entirely superseded me. There, set forth in capital letters, and flaunting a lengthy supplement for that express purpose, we read how the "gallant gentleman was met and welcomed by the inhabitants; how they took the horses out of his carriage; and how a whole set of jolly tars drew him up the High-street. "Almost too much honour," as Miss Prim whispered me, confidentially, "to be shown to one man." "How, when arrived there at a platform erected for that purpose, and already crowded with blue and pink bonnets, he was met and escorted up the steps by our great man, the Honourable Curzon de Curzon; and how, when arrived there, he was instantly attacked and made to stand and listen for the better part of an hour to a long address got up for him by the citizens, and which, beginning at the time that he was a very small boy, enumerated all his shining graces and acts of valour up to the very present moment. I need not recapitulate any further, however, after this fashion, for of course you have seen the Darkshire Chronicle, which went through two editions, supplements and all, and is now labouring under some elaborate sketches of this "interesting event," which it threatens to bring forth during the next week. Perhaps, dear Susan, you would rather hear how I fared during this exciting period. Having always been of opinion that discretion is the best part of valour, and that it was not impossible we might be run over in the crowd, to say nothing of the indelicacy of two unprotected females obtruding themselves without a male escort on the platform, I persuaded my friend Miss Bell to avail herself with me of Mrs. Mitten's obliging offer of seeing the "show" from the top of her house; and so, like all aspirants, we obtained our object after a good deal of difficulty. It is true it was rather a trial getting out on the roof, as the hole we had to squeeze through for that purpose was about three feet from the top of the landing, and so small that, though our heads and waists struggled through with some exertion, yet our skirts and Scotch petticoats were not nearly so obliging, and, indeed, without help from behind, I do not think we should ever have accomplished it. When we returned, I adopted the plan of coming back head-foremost, which was far better, though the position was on the whole precarious, as well as peculiar, and I am afraid Miss Bell has not yet recovered it. To tell you all that we saw from the top of that roof would be quite impossible. What with the tiles that slanted so much that we were always slipping down in spite of the cushions stuffed under us; and that wretched cold-water gutter in the leads at our feet; and the two cats that were scrambling and making love on the top of the tiles; and that

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wretched young journeyman painter who would try to climb up over our heads, and was always falling down back upon us; and the little blacks from the chimneys that came drifting into our faces, we got our senses somewhat confused to begin with. There was a terrible little girl there, too, who, whenever she was not eating gingerbread-nuts, would lean so far over the narrow stone balustrade, which was our only support to look down into the street below, that Miss Bell and I fully expected every moment would be her last. Indeed, I secretly got hold of her skirts behind, the only return for which kindness was, that she "stickied" all my best French gloves in her vigorous efforts to get them out of my hands. Then the noise and hurrahing from below was very deafening and confusing; and as for hearing a word of the long address, of course that was quite out of the question. It was thickly buttered, we knew, with the flowers of rhetoric-such as "admiration of the nation," "sympathy of the people," "your heroic actions, which will ever live in our hearts," honoured by your visit," &c. for of course we had been in the secret of the committee that was held beforehand, and we knew all about it, even to the naval band that was invited down to do our hero honour; only, unfortunately, some one in their zeal asked the band for their services, and forgot to ask the leave of the band's captain, for which they got an answer that was perhaps more short than pleasant. These flowers of rhetoric were, however, quite thrown away upon us in our elevated position, though it was plain to see when they took place, as the speaker held the roll in his hand, and from the distance where we were, appeared to be either threatening or expounding the law to the gallant officer who stood next him. Whenever his gestures grew most energetic, then we knew that he was delivered of one of his most flowery sentences; and whenever he stopped for breath, and glanced round him on the sea of heads beneath, that we found was the signal for caps thrown in the air, voices, shouting out "Three cheers for the red, white, and blue," and other popular demonstrations of the mob's approval. When the roll was finished, the speaker still went on with some dumb pantomime, which we took to be his own peculiar and original rhetoric, and finished by presenting the roll to the gallant officer and solemnly shaking hands with him, which sign of manual approbation was followed up again by the Honourable Curzon de Curzon, who then spoke for himself, and in a loud, clear, commanding voice, so as to be heard even where we stood, gave us a short summary of the gallant officer's life, and all the good services he had rendered to queen and country. After this they all shook hands again, as though they had signed a treaty of peace; and then the hero of the day stood forward and thanked the people in a few feeling, kind, and appropriate words. He seemed really touched by the honour they had shown him; and there was something very affecting in seeing that grey head bared before the populace that had pushed on so nobly within range of the bristling shots from Sebastopol, and had now come to enjoy his triumphs in England in the hard-won glory that had bowed the heads of so many good and brave, amongst the noblest of whom his own son might be reckoned. There was a hush for one expressive moment after he had done speaking, and then an unhappy-looking baby set up a shriek, which was the signal for loud and repeated cheers that burst yet and