A SPECIMEN DAY

A DAY LW H.M.S. ASCENSION ISLAND.

q1HIS was the " fancy " title of a volcanic island in -I- Mid-south Atlantic, administered since Napoleon's imprisonment at St. Helena by the British Admiralty much on the lines of a naval vessel. It has recently been dissociated from the Admiralty and handed over to the Eastern Telegraph Co. It lies .600 miles north of St. Helena, and is in extent about eight miles by six.

Mail 0! Mail 0! •So it was cried out in the lonely settlement one a month only when the mail steamer from the Cape arrived bringing news and perhaps a passenger' or two from the outer world ; besides some goods and casks of double XX Bass's beer, brewed specially bitter for the Tropics.

We—self, wife, three-year-old son and Ascension-born baby—are waking up to the cry at 6 a.m. when the sunrise always comes (the sunset always at 6 p.m.) at 5 degrees south of the Equator. The usual day (in the shade) and night temperature ranges from 84 to 87 degrees throughout the year, but it is tempered by the never-ceasing career of the trade wind through our veranda bungalow.

The sough of the perpetual wind is mingled with the boom of huge sea rollers reverberating on the rocky shores and shaking their very foundations. Here and there on the arid lava fields small pyramids of dust called " devils " go dancing and whirling upwards in circles towards the blue sky.

We look out on a scene so well described by the usually unimaginative Charles Darwin in his Voyage of the 'Beagle' when he says of Ascension : "I took my stand on a somewhat elevated part of the lava field in the N.E. of the island and there I saw the land not lying before me smiling in beauty, but staring in all its naked hideousness."

Hideous, naked, paralysing, sunbaked, with conical craters and hillocks of reddish and yellowish and brownish and blackest scoriae piled one above the other in a monstrous melancholy ! Thus the land appears to us. We think of the American Naval Expedition coming here shortly after Darwin and " cutely " summing up the scenery as "looking like Hell with the fire put out."

So we begin our day in this naval ship land. The captain is Governor. There are the following officers (some married) on the staff : One lieutenant R.N., one lieutenant R.M.A., one lieutenant R.M.L.I., two surgeons R.N., to paymasters and one chaplain R.N., five warrant officers and three or four bluejackets for ths captain. . . .

There are barracks for two hundred Marines who ars " tradesinen," builders, &c., and huts. on the beach for twenty. Kroo boys, active negroes from the coast of West Africa who are indeed . amphibious boatmen. These form the entire population of our ship-land, with the exception of an English farm-bailiff on the Green Mountain Island : no other inhabitants are allowed here. The whole island is composed of various lavas, prehistoric, blown out by volcanic forces with cavities and eminences of different sizes, :just as a sponge is structured.

Providentially rain falls on the Green Mountain (2,900 feet high) and clothes the lava for about two thousand feet from the top with greenery. Here lovely walks wind round the heights, whence you may gaze in wonder on the hideous rainless lava piles below, sloping down to the sparkling ocean. How glorious is the heavenly air up here ! How cool and clean after the dusty dried-up lava pandemonium below ! Where in the world can there be a more perfect climate ?

So when we looked out from our home on the lava waste below that morning a great longing came to us for a spell up the mountain amid ferns and flowers and banana trees.

A " requisition " to the Captain produced an " order " for a mule luggage cart to Garden Cottage for a carriage for the family and a riding horse for the Padre.

A six miles climb up the " ramps " brought us to our haven. Hard by it was the entrance to a tunnel bored by naval officers in 1840, piercing the mountain to extend the 'pass.

Above its archway appeared the legend "Sic itur ad astra" cut into the lava rock. Here at length at Garden Cottage was clean and welcome refreshment for man and beast after the many dusty mawkish meals below.

This volcanic wilderness with its Green Mount can provide a very decent menu from its natural resources alone, a remarkable one in fact. Turtle son") may be had daily, of which one never tires, for the finest turtles in the world frequent the lava shores of Ascension. Then may come roasted land crab, or the cavalli fish, or oysters ; a piece of the small mountain lamb or a fran- colin partridge or pheasant ; a guava or a blackberry tart ; new potatoes and peas from the mountain garden ; oranges and bananas. And so to bed on the Green Mountain under the mosquito nets and beneath the sign of the bright Southern Cross.

A. C. H. RIC'E.