once, like a reasonable man, and do your duty, and thank God for what you have been allowed to see; and try to become of the same mind as that most brilliant of old ladies, who boasted that she had not been abroad since she saw the Apotheosis of Voltaire, before the French Revolution; and did not care to go, as long as all manner of clever people were kind enough to go instead, and write charming books about what they had seen for her.

But the westward fever was slow to cool:  and with wistful eyes we watched the sun by day, and Venus and the moon by night, sink down into the gulf, to lighten lands which we should never see.  A few days more, and we were steaming out to the Bocas—­which we had begun to love as the gates of a new home—­heaped with presents to the last minute, some of them from persons we hardly knew.  Behind us Port of Spain sank into haze:  before us Monos rose, tall, dark, and grim—­ if Monos could be grim—­in moonless night.  We ran on, and past the island; this time we were going, not through the Boca de Monos, but through the next, the Umbrella Bocas.  It was too dark to see houses, palm-trees, aught but the ragged outline of the hills against the northern sky, and beneath, sparks of light in sheltered coves, some of which were already, to one of us, well-beloved nooks.  There was the great gulf of the Boca de Monos.  There was Morrison’s—­our good Scotch host of seven weeks since; and the glasses were turned on it, to see, if possible, through the dusk, the almond-tree and the coco-grove for the last time.  Ah, well—­ When we next meet, what will he be, and where?  And where the handsome Creole wife, and the little brown.  Cupid who danced all naked in the log canoe, till the white gentlemen, swimming round, upset him; and canoe, and boy, and men rolled and splashed about like a shoal of seals at play, beneath the cliff with the Seguines and Cereuses; while the ripple lapped the Moriche-nuts about the roots of the Manchineel bush, and the skippers leaped and flashed outside, like silver splinters?  And here, where we steamed along, was the very spot where we had seen the shark’s back-fin when we rowed back from the first Guacharo cave.  And it was all over.

We are such stuff as dreams are made of.  And as in a dream, or rather as part of a dream, and myself a phantom and a play-actor, I looked out over the side, and saw on the right the black Avails of Monos, on the left the black walls of Huevos—­a gate even grander, though not as narrow, as that of Monos; and the Umbrella Rock, capped with Matapalo and Cactus, and night-blowing Cereus, dim in the dusk.  And now we were outside.  The roar of the surf, the tumble of the sea, the rush of the trade-wind, told us that at once.  Out in the great sea, with Grenada, and kind friends in it, ahead; not to be seen or reached till morning light.  But we looked astern and not ahead.  We could see into and through the gap in Huevos, through which