“They are literally the pick of Martinique, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the other Islands celebrated for beautiful women.  Of course they’ve all got a touch of the tar brush in them, but the French or the Spanish blood makes them glorious for a few years, and during those few they come here and make hay.  Some come at certain seasons only, others perch here till they change in a night from houri to hag.  This daylight trade gives them a raison d’etre, but wait till after dark.  God! this is a hell hole; but by moonlight or torchlight this street is one of the sights of the earth.  The magnificent beauty of the women, enhanced by silken stuffs of every colour, the varied and often picturesque attire of the men, all half mad with drink—­well, if you want to sleep, you’d better get a room high up.”

“Mine is up one hundred and seventeen steps.  I am but afraid I may not see all there is to see.”

But before the week was half out he had tired of St. Thomas by day and by night.  The picture was too one-sided, too heavily daubed with colour.  It made a palette of the imagination, sticky and crude.  He began to desire the green plantations of St. Croix, and more than ever he longed for the snow-fields of the north.  Two days of hard work concluded Mr. Cruger’s business, and on the thirtieth of the month he weighed anchor, in company with many others, and set sail for St. Croix.  He started under a fair breeze, but a mile out the wind dropped, and he was until midnight making the harbour of Christianstadt When they were utterly becalmed the sun seemed to focus his hell upon the little sloop.  It rolled sickeningly in the oily wrinkled waters, and Alexander put his Pope in his pocket.  The sea had a curious swell, and he wondered if an earthquake were imminent.  The sea was not quite herself when her foundations were preparing to shake.  Earth-quakes had never concerned him, but as the boat drifted past the reef into the harbour of Christianstadt at midnight, he was assailed by a fit of terror so sudden and unaccountable that he could recall but one sensation in his life that approached it:  shortly after he arrived on the Island he had stolen down to the lagoon one night, fascinated by the creeping mist, the scowling manchineels, the talk of its sinister inhabitant, and was enjoying mightily his new feeling of creeping terror, when the silence was broken by a heavy swish, and he saw the white belly of the shark not three feet from him.  He had scampered up the hill to his mother’s skirts as fast as his legs could carry him, nor visited the lagoon again until the shark was mouldering on its bed.  To-night a mist, almost imperceptible except on the dark line of coast, changed the beauty of the moonbeams to a livid light that gave the bay the horrid pallor of a corpse.  The masses of coral rock in the shallow waters looked leprous, the surface was so glassy that it fell in splinters from the oars of the boat that towed them to shore.  There was not a sound from the reef, not a sound from the land.  The slender lacing mangroves in the swamp looked like upright serpents, black and petrified, and the Fort on the high bluff might have been a sarcophagus full of dead men but for the challenge of the sentry.