The sea breeze lasted us just long enough to enable us to clear the shoals and handsomely gain an offing of about three miles.  Then it died away and left us wallowing helplessly in the heavy swell that was running.  Meanwhile the sun sank beneath the horizon in one of those blazes of indescribable glory of colour which seem to be peculiar to the West Indies.  The darkness closed down upon us like a shutter, and the stars leapt out of the rapidly darkening blue overhead with that soft, lambent, clarity of light which is never beheld save in the tropics. Then, after tumbling about uncomfortably for nearly an hour, we felt the land breeze, and, squaring away before it, soon ran off into the true breeze of the trade wind.