yourself with the great principles of the world you will be a failure, because your mind is created in harmony with them, and if you use it for smaller purposes it will fail as surely as if it tried to lie or steal.  Your passions are violent, and you have a blackness of hate in you which will ruin you or others according to the control you acquire over it; so be warned.  But you never can fail through any of the ordinary defects of character.  You are too bold and independent to lie, even if you had been born with any such disposition; you are honourable and tactful, and there is as little doubt of your fascination and your power over others.  But remember—­use all these great forces when your ambition is hottest, then you can stumble upon no second place.  As for your heart, it will control your head sometimes, but your insatiable brain will accomplish so much that it can afford to lose occasionally; and the warmth of your nature will make you so many friends, that I draw from it more strength to die than from all your other gifts.  Leave this Island as soon as you can.  Ah, if I could give you but a few thousands to force the first doors!”

She died on the 25th of February, 1768.  Her condition had been known for some days, and her sisters had shed many tears, aghast and deeply impressed at the tragic fate of this youngest, strangest, and most gifted of their father’s children.  Unconsciously they had expected her to do something extraordinary, and it was yet too soon to realize that she had.  His aunts had announced far and wide that Alexander was the brightest boy on the Island, but that a nation lay folded in his saucy audacious brain they hardly could be expected to know.

V

The Great House of Peter Lytton was hung with white from top to bottom, and every piece of furniture looked as if the cold wing of death had touched it.  A white satin gown, which had come from London for Rachael six years before,—­just too late, for she never went to a ball again,—­was taken from her mahogany press and wrapped about her wasted body.  Her magnificent hair was put out of sight in a cap of blond lace.

The fashionable world of St. Croix, which had seen little of Rachael in life, came to the ceremonious exit of her body.  They sat along the four sides of the large drawing-room, looking like a black dado against the white walls, and the Rev. Cecil Wray Goodchild, the pastor of the larger number of that sombre flock, sonorously read the prayers for the dead.  Hugh Knox felt that his was the right to perform that ceremony; but he was a Presbyterian, and Peter Lytton was not one of his converts.  He was there, however, and so were several Danes, whose colourless faces and heads completed the symbolization encircling the coffin.  People of Nevis, St. Christopher, and St. Croix were there, the sisters born of the same mother, a kinsman of Hamilton’s, himself named James Hamilton,