The long street interested Alexander’s practical mind more than legends or architecture.  Huge stone buildings—­warehouses, stores, exchange- and counting-houses—­extended from the street to the edge of the water, where ships were unloaded and loaded from doors at the rear.  Men of every nation and costume moved in that street; and for a day Mr. Cruger’s business was in abeyance, while the boy from the quiet Island of St. Croix leaned against one of the heavy tamarind trees at the foot of the first hill, and watched the restless crowd of Europeans, Asiatics, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, North and South Americans.  There were as many national costumes as there were rival flags in the harbour.  There was the British admiral in his regimentals and powdered queue, the Chinaman in his blouse and pigtail, the Frenchman with his earrings, villanous Malays, solemn merchants from Boston, and negroes trundling barrows of Spanish dollars.  But it was the extraordinary assortment of faces and the violent contrasts of temperament and character they revealed which interested Alexander more than aught else.  With all his reading he had not imagined so great a variety of types; his mental pictures had been the unconscious reflection of British, Danish, or African.  Beyond these he had come in contact with nothing more striking than sailors from the neighbouring Islands, who had suggested little besides the advisability of placing an extra guard over the money boxes whilst they were in port.  Most of these men who surged before him were merchants of the first rank or the representatives of others as important,—­captains of large ships and their mates.  The last sauntered and cursed the heat, which was infernal; but the merchants moved rapidly from one business house to another, or talked in groups, under the tamarind trees, of the great interests which brought them to the Indies.  Upon the inherent characteristics which their faces expressed were superimposed the different seals of those acquired,—­shrewdness, suspicion, a hawk-like alertness, the greed of acquisition.  Alexander, with something like terror of the future, reflected that there was not one of these men he cared to know.  He knew there were far greater cities than the busy little entrepot of the West Indies, but he rightly doubted if he ever should see again so cosmopolitan a mob, a more picked assortment of representative types.  Not one looked as if he remembered his wife and children, his creed, or the art and letters of his land.  They were a sweating, cursing, voluble, intriguing, greedy lot, picturesque to look upon, profitable to study, calculated to rouse in a boy of intellectual passions a fury of final resentment against the meannesses of commercial life.  Alexander jerked his shoulders with disgust and moved slowly down the street.  After he had reflected that great countries involved great ideas, and that there was no place for either political or moral ideals in an isolated and purely commercial town like little Charlotte Amalie, he recovered his poise, and lent himself to his surroundings again with considerable philosophy.