Nevis herself was like a green jewel casket, after the autumn rains.  Oranges and sweet limes were yellow in her orchards, the long-leaved banana trees were swelling with bunches of fruit, the guavas were ready for cream and the boiling.  The wine was in the cocoanut, the royal palms had shed their faded summer leaves and glittered like burnished metal.  The gorgeous masses of the croton bush had drawn fresh colour from the rain.  In the woods and in the long avenues which wound up the mountain to the Great House of every estate, the air was almost cold; but out under the ten o’clock sun, even a West Indian could keep warm, and the negroes sang as they reaped the cane.  The sea near the shore was like green sunlight, but some yards out it deepened into that intense hot blue which is the final excess of West Indian colouring.  The spray flew high over the reef between Nevis and St. Kitts, glittering like the salt ponds on the desolate end of the larger island, the roar of the breakers audible in the room where the child who was to be called Alexander Hamilton was born.

Rachael rose to a ceaseless demand upon her attention for which she was grateful during the long days of Hamilton’s absence.  Alexander turned out to be the most restless and monarchical of youngsters and preferred his mother to his black attendants.  She ruled him with a firm hand, however, for she had no mind to lessen her pleasure in him, and although she could not keep him quiet, she prevented the blacks from spoiling him.

During the hurricane months Hamilton yielded to her nervous fears, as he had done in the preceding year, and crossed to St. Kitts but seldom.  As a matter of fact, hurricanes of the first degree, are rare in the West Indies, the average to each island being one in a century.  But from the 25th of August, when all the Caribbean world prostrates itself in church while prayers for deliverance from the awful visitation are read, to the 25th of October, when the grateful or the survivors join in thanksgiving, every wind alarms the nervous, and every round woolly cloud must contain the white squall.  Rachael knew that Nevis boats had turned over when minor squalls dashed down the Narrows between the extreme points of the Islands, and that they were most to be dreaded in the hurricane season.  Hamilton’s inclination was to spare in every possible way the woman who had sacrificed so much for him, and he asked little urging to idle his days in the cool library with his charming wife and son.  Therefore his business suffered, for his partners took advantage of his negligence; and the decay of their fortunes began when Rachael, despite the angry protests of Archibald Hamn, sold her property on St. Kitts and gave Hamilton the money.  He withdrew from the firm which had treated him inconsiderately, and set up a business for himself.  For a few years he was hopeful, although more than once obliged to borrow money from his wife.  She gave freely, for she had been brought up in the careless plenty