guarded by several regiments of cavalry, were brought along the Boulevards on their way to Versailles. We stood, to see them pass, at the top of the Rue de la Paix, in an enormous crowd: all Paris had come out, exploding with satisfaction, to hoot the captives. I have looked on at many scenes of grievous misery and degradation, but never have I beheld any sight so strangely painful as that march past. The exceptional aspect of abasement of that mass of wretches arose from an altogether special cause. It was produced neither by the prostrate condition of many of the prisoners (several of whom could scarcely drag themselves along), nor by the hideous expression of most of their faces, nor by the merciless brutality with which they were treated by both the soldiers and the mob: it sprang from a totally different characteristic of the sight -a characteristic that nobody had ever beheld before, nor perhaps ever imagined. Every one of them had been forced to turn his coat inside out! It was the astonishing effect of that livery of shame, worn by 6000 men at once, that rendered the scene so matchlessly abject we two almost shivered as we stared at that spectacle of ignominy. We had not conceived it possible that vile dishonor could express itself so poignantly. Even the grotesqueness of the parti-colored sleeve-linings many of the pairs being of different stuffs and colors, and nearly all of them in rags-was lamentable, not laughable. And yet, after all, notwithstanding the extraordinarily repulsive features of that piebald procession, it cannot be denied that it was a fitting and illustrative ending to the odious and imbecile Com

mune.

On the Monday morning I walked with Mr. Cartwright along the line of the fortifications from the Porte Maillot to the Point du Jour, at the end of Auteuil, in order to see the damage done by the bombardment. The smashing had occurred capriciously some houses had almost escaped; others were carried away down to the very ground;

others again had fronts or sides shot off, but were otherwise little injured. In two cases, where the façades alone had disappeared, the furniture of four floors was still standing almost undisturbed in the opened rooms. But the general total of destruction, considerable and widespread as it was, seemed relatively small when we considered. that it was the result of several weeks of continuous shelling. The fortifications themselves were not much knocked about, though, in places, the ground behind them was ploughed deeply.

The cleaning up of Paris, which commenced on the Sunday, directly after the passage of the prisoners, was pretty well completed by the Monday night. The rapidity with which it was performed astonished everybody: it was only achieved because everybody helped. Of course certain signs of fighting remained visible; but the barricades, the holes, the fallen trees, the dirt, vanished in twenty-four hours. The dead were carted off; the paving-stones were laid back roughly in their places; the rubbish was swept into heaps. The sensation of delivery was so keen among the population that they almost rejoiced.

I terminate these recollections by quoting a curious definition of the Commune, given to me by a man whose name is known in England, but whose words have been heard by few English

men.

About the middle of June, Oliphant's mother and Mr. Harris arrived together in Paris from America. Mr. Harris remained there for three months, during which period he conveyed to me, with the assumption of inspiration which was proper to him, a certain number of remarkably expressed opinions. One of them described the Commune as "a yell from the lower man; an up-seething from the turbid sources; a snatch at the impossible and the undefined; a failure where success would have meant a nation's shame."-Blackwood's Magazine.

THE attack on the islands of St. Do mingo and Jamaica in 1655 may be described as the first of our "little wars." It was directed, it is true, against a European power; but none the less, from the scene of action, the strength of the forces engaged, and the general circumstances, it belongs more properly to this category than to any other. By this time we have learned more or less how such enterprises for the conquest of tropical territory should be conducted; but in the days of the Protectorate the experience of such expeditions was not great, and the secret of carrying them to a successful issue, if not unknown, had been forgotten. The West Indian expedition of 1654-5 therefore claims some attention as our first Statedirected tropical war; and it deserves possibly even more for that, both from a political and military point of view, it was Cromwell's greatest failure.

It is immaterial here to discuss the motive for Cromwell's attack on the Spanish colonies. The temptation to refill an empty treasury with the wealth of the Indies was certainly strong; and reprisals for Spanish aggression against our West Indian possessions of Tortuga and St. Kitts made a very respectable pretext for yielding to it. He must have determined on the design almost simultaneously with his elevation to the Protectorate; but he carefully kept it secret, dangling the bait of an English alliance before the eyes of France till he drove Mazarin nearly to desperation, and then in turn coquetting with Spain, but revealing his real purpose to no one. The design indeed was a very great one, nothing less than the expulsion of the Spaniards from the Antilles and the Main, and the plantation of Englishmen in their stead. "We think," he wrote in October, 1655 (nine months after the departure of the expedition), " and it is much designed among us to strive with the Spaniard for the mastery of all those seas. . . to restrain and suppress the tyrannies and usurpations of

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the King of Spain in those countries by a pretended donation of the Pope." The source from which he drew the first inspiration for this great scheme may by traced to two men,-to Thomas Gage, a converted Jesuit priest, who knew the Spanish Islands and the Spanish Main well, and had written a book on the subject, and to Colonel Thomas Modyford of Barbados. The former probably hated the Spaniards with all the hatred of a renegade; but the latter had peculiar reasons for trying to ingratiate himself with Cromwell. Barbados, almost the oldest of our colonial possessions, was at this time an extremely thriving little place, and had already sufficiently good opinion of itself to claim to be a limb of the Commonwealth." The Civil War in England, however, had landed the island in internal troubles. Early in 1650 a conspiracy had been hatched to drive all Independents from Barbados, and at the head of this conspiracy was Colonel Thomas Modyford. The plot was defeated by the indiscretion of one of the conspirators, who discovered it in his cups; but Modyford was certainly implicated, and this was not likely to make him acceptable to the Protector. Shortly after this, Lord Willoughby of Parham, a renegade Parliamentary officer, proclaimed King Charles the Second in Barbados and raised the disorders afresh. This of course was not to be endured by a victorious Parliament ; and a naval expedition under the famous admiral, Sir George Ascue (or Avscough) was despatched to reduce the island to submission. Again Modyford came to the fore, this time to support the Parliament; and his defection was so serviceable that Ascue was able to effect his task very speedily. It was, beyond all doubt, with the object of ingratiating himself still further with the Protector that Modyford took such interest in Cromwell's projects against Spanish America.

He was able to establish himself as a

personage of importance in connection with the expedition. Barbados, from its position to windward (that is, to trade-windward) of all the Antilles, possessed exceptional advantages as a base of operations, being in the first place the nearest point to England, and in the next the best for a depot from which troops and stores could be distributed to any region of the Spanish West Indies. Indeed, though ships have so long been independent of sails, the prestige of Barbados' strategic advantages was such that only within the past ten years has she ceased to be the headquarters of our forces in the West Indies. Cromwell was alive to these advantages, and Modyford made it his business to supplement them by others. Following the frequent practice of colonists on a visit to the old country (where there is no risk of contradiction from their fellows), he greatly exaggerated the loyalty and devotion of Barbados, and promised every kind of assistance in recruits, arms, and supplies. This type of man being less common in those days than in these, his assurances were accepted without any reserve; and the zeal of Barbados was reckoned as an important contribution toward the success of the scheme.

It was settled then that Barbados should be the base of operations. But another British possession could also be of service, the new England which lay on the other side of the Atlantic. Supplies would be the great difficulty, and these could be furnished from this English America; and not only supplies, but settlers to occupy the territory wrested from Spain, who should be more or less trained as a military force and capable of self-defence. Thus both sides of the Atlantic were to combine in the attack; and the governors in New England received their instructions accordingly. But even this was not all. While one fleet was to busy itself in the Caribbean Archipelago and on the Main, a second was to cruise off the coast of Spain to intercept both the plate-fleets from the West and re-enforcements from the East. Such was the plan, and assuredly the combinations did not lack breadth and boldness. One point only remained for settlement; whether the first attack should

be made on the Main or on an island. Gage was for the first, and named the Orinoco as the objective; Modyford was for the second, naming Cuba or Hispaniola (St. Domingo) for choice; these captured, the mainland could be attacked subsequently; and Modyford's counsel prevailed.

Turning back then to the opening of the year 1654, we find Cromwell, just established as Lord Protector, busy with his preparations, pressing sailors, and even soldiers, for the service. Looking behind the scenes into the papers of the Secretary's Office at Whitehall, we find even more activity.* The British agent at Hamburg was busy sending over shiploads of timber for masts, and great stores of gunpowder, which latter, being provided by the army contractors of the period, of course proved to be of inferior quality. Then again there was immense preparation of clothes, these being always an important part of any great enterprise from the Nibelungenlied onward-clothes for four thousand men, and most of them of cotton, the virtues of flannel in the Tropics being still unknown. Next, there was eight months' store of provisions to be gathered and embarked,biscuit, pork, pease, beef, and stockfish; six months' supply of cheese,

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the other two months to be supplied in oil," also flour and raisins to make duff withal. For liquor, there was three months' provision of beer, the other five months to be made up in brandy and arrack. Tucked in at the end of the list, apparently as an afterthought, appears ten or twelve thousand of soap." Finally, the climate of the West Indies being not of the best repute for healthiness, due thought was taken for medical stores, "emplasters,' unguents, pills, powders, electuaries, and so forth, to the amount of £21 11s. for each hundred men.

The scene of bustle and confusion at Portsmouth, where all these preparations were going forward, must have beggared description. In the first place, the officer in charge was not a naval man, being no other than Colonel Desborough, sometimes quartermaster

*Thurloe's State Papers, from which most of my information is taken.

of Cromwell's Ironsides, and now majorgeneral, member of the Council of State, and commissioner of the Admiralty. The task before him, that of equipping and despatching two fleets, one of twenty-five vessels and one of forty, on a distant cruise, would have been formidable even for an expert, particularly as one of the fleets was to carry a small army with it. But, apart from his inexperience, Desborough was embarrassed by want of organization and discipline among the men chosen for the service, both soldiers and sailThe impressed sailors were many of them "masterless rogues, vagabonds and unprofitable instruments," gathered from all parts of Great Britain, and naturally prone to disorder, to say the least of it. The soldiers, too, seem to have been what we now call "drafts;" twelve hundred men, for instance, were drawn from the regiments in London, and possibly were not the men that the commanding officers were most sorry to part with. The rest, some two thousand men or more, seem to have been made up of volunteers, adventurers, tag, rag, and bobtail, good, bad, and indifferent, including Royalists and many other of the discontented then so numerous in England.

The despatch of Blake's fleet of twenty-five vessels to the Mediterranean on October 25th brought some little relief to the unfortunate Desborough; but the confusion was soon made worse by the concentration of the whole of the heterogeneous West Indian force in Portsmouth. The impressed seamen broke out into mutiny, and their wives pursued the Protector in the streets crying out to know whither their husbands were bound. This was a secret of which Desborough himself was ignorant, and Cromwell only an swered that the French and Spanish ambassadors would gladly give him a million apiece to know. And this was probably true, for all Europe stood at gaze while these armaments were equipping, France, Spain, Holland, and Denmark, each dreading lest they should be turned against herself. But this secrecy, however vital to the success of the expedition, seems to have made

every one concerned rather sulky, including Desborough himself.

The mutiny was put down mainly by blandishment on the part of Desborough and of Vice Admiral' Penn, commander designate of the fleet, who now (November, 1654) appeared on the scene at Portsmouth, trying to reduce the confused business of victualling" to some method, and, as a first step, condemning some bad beer supplied by the contractors. This William Penn (father of the famous William, at this time a boy of eleven) was a man of no more than thirty-four years old, who had seen much service on the coast of Ireland, hunting Prince Rupert in the Mediterranean, and most notably in the great Dutch war just concluded. He had commanded a squadron in the furious engagements of June and August, 1653, and had personally engaged the great Tromp ship to ship. After Blake he was probably the most distinguished naval officer of the time, with ideas of his own, too, about naval tactics; and he had proved himself a good public servant, though at heart a Royalist. His colleague in command of the land forces was one Robert Venables, a colonel who had gained some distinction in the Irish war and had been very successful in hunting down Tories. He also is said to have had a leaning to the Royalist side.

One would have thought that these two were commanders enough for the expedition, but such was not Cromwell's opinion. Joined with these were certain commissioners: one Mr. Edward Winslow, apparently a merchant, or at any rate a man of business, who had been employed in some recent negotiations with Denmark, and as a kind of commissioner of the Treasury, or Civil Lord of the Admiralty; one Colonel Gregory Butler who had served under Essex, Waller, and Massey in the Civil War till 1646; and the Governor of Barbados, Daniel Searle. The functions of these commissioners will appear in the course of the narrative; but it is to be noted that they were no novelty. There were civil commissioners on the staff of the New Model Army, and also in Scotland (after Dunbar), who seem to have taken in hand the