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Wreck of “Express” Steamer on the Corbiêres Rocks.
the Jersey jury entirely acquitted. No French or English resident is said to have much chance with an islander in the civil courts, and on one occasion lately, when by some accident or mistake justice was done, the Jerseyman was heard to exclaim as he went out: “What a shame it is, that foreigners should be allowed to beat us in our own courts!”
By its situation the town of St. Helier’s, most overgrown in population for the size of the island, is the receptacle for all the impurities, moral and physical, of this pretty little island, and for much of those of the external world. It is cooped up in a close, unhealthy hollow, and the wonder is how the cholera could ever have passed over it without destroying half the inhabitants. By some strange perversity, the best parts are built away from the sea, so that the fashionables are shut out from the view of Elizabeth Castle and the harbour, which is really pretty. There is no promenade near the sea, the only place answering that description being the College Gardens, where the military band plays. The strand, and pier, and outskirts of the harbour are given up to seafaring business, and being also the haunt of the scum of England and France, are not desirable as a social lounge. The New Parade Ground is prevented from being a public promenade by being entirely in the hands of the gaminocracy, one or more of whose body, some time last summer, had the assurance to steal a sheep which was put there to graze, flay it on the spot, and carry off the mutton, under the very nose of the police-office. There is a theatre at St. Helier’s, at the wrong end of the town, the performances of which are nightly disturbed by drunken sailors, it being no one’s business to keep order.
In short, our impressions of Jersey have tended much to corroborate in our minds the poet’s dictum, that
God made the country, and man made the town;
for while the town is a huge seething kettle of corruption, the country is a labyrinth of loveliness. It is a labyrinth of lanes all arched by trees and fringed by lush herbage, and with certain lights presenting little fantastic avenues of fairy beauty. It is a labyrinth of vallies running into one another, and losing their branches in the hills, each with its own little rivulet, opening into interminable glimpses of sea and land, while in the first springtime the ground is beautified with snowdrops, primroses, violets, and especially jonquils and daffodils. But each part of Jersey with all its variety, has a certain likeness. Everywhere are seen the same quaint old farmhouses of granite, half sunk in the earth, solidly built, with moss overgrown roofs and round arched doorways; everywhere the same, orchards and perpendicular banks covered with fern and all its congeners; everywhere in summer, the huge geraniums attaining the growth of trees, the semi-tropical oleanders, and acacias, and magnolias, and camellias, growing in the open air all the year round; everywhere the same round picturesque wells covered with botany, looking as if built to be bomb-proof; the same pretty little fields and beautiful eyed and silken coated cattle tethered in them, and everywhere round the coast the same stacks of vraic or seaweed, used to fertilise the fields, the same Martello-towers, picturesque from the colours of the stone, the same fields of reefs inhabited by curious anemones and starfish, and girdling all the same gemmy sea, far more enjoyable here from the facility of bathing in it at almost any season, than the salt element as familiarly known to the frequenters of the coast of Great Britain.
