LEEWARD ISLANDS  , a

group in the West Indies . They derive their name from being less exposed to the prevailing N.E. trade wind than the adjacent Windward Islands . They are the most northerly of the Lesser Antilles, and form a curved chain stretching S.W. from Puerto Rico to meet St Lucia, the most northerly of the Windward Islands . They consist of the Virgin Islands, with St Kitts, Antigua, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique and their various dependencies . The Virgin Islands are owned by Great Britain and Denmark, Holland having St Eustatius, with .Saba, and part of St Martin . France possesses Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Bartholomew and the remainder of St Martin . The rest of the islands are British, and (with the exception of Sombrero, a small island used only as a lighthouse-station) form, under one governor, a colony divided into five presidencies, namely: Antigua (with Barbuda and Redonda), St Kitts (with Nevis and Anguilla), Dominica, Montserrat and the Virgin Islands . Total pop . (1901) 127,536 . There is one federal executive council nominated by the crown, and one federal legislative council—ten nominated and ten elected members . Of the latter, four are chosen by the unofficial members of the local legislative council of Antigua, two by those of Dominica, and four by the non-official members of the local legislative council of St Kitts-Nevis . The federal legislative council meets once annually, usually at St John, Antigua .

LE FANU,

JOSEPH SHERIDAN (1814–1873), Irish journalist and author, was born of an old Huguenot family at Dublin on the 28th of August 1814 . He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1833 . At an early age he had given proof of literary talent, and in 1837 he joined the staff of the Dublin University Magazine, of which he became later editor and proprietor . In 1837 he produced the Irish ballad Phaudhrig Croohore. which was shortly afterwards followed by a second, Shamus O'Brien, successfully recited in the United States by Samuel Lover . In 1839 he became proprietor of the Warder, a Dublin newspaper, and, after purchasing the Evening Packet and a large interest in the Dublin Evening Mail, he combined the three papers under the title the Evening Mail, a weekly reprint from which was . issued as the Warder . After the death of his wife in 1858 he lived in retirement, and his best work was produced at this period of his life . He wrote some clever novels, of a sensational order, in which his vigorous imagination and his Irish love of the supernatural have full play . He died in Dublin on the 7th of February 1873 . His best-known novels are The House by the Churchyard (1863) and Uncle Silas, a Tale of Bartram Haugh (1864) . The Purcell Papers, Irish stories dating from his college clays, were edited with a memoir of the author by A . P . Graves in 1880 .